The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is leading NextGen, a wide-ranging transformation and modernization of the nation's air traffic system. This transformation is designed to reduce congestion, accommodate growth in commercial aviation, and benefit the environment through reductions in carbon emissions, fuel consumption, and noise. A multidisciplinary John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe Center) team is supporting FAA efforts to accelerate the components of NextGen with near-term benefits.
The Volpe Center provides critical support to the implementation of the FAA's Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B). ADS-B enables a continuous flow of data messages among aircraft in-flight and ground stations, transmitting real-time aircraft positions and trajectories, weather conditions, and airspace restrictions. The Volpe team was instrumental in negotiating the deployment of ADS-B weather and communications equipment to offshore oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The resulting improvements in safe aircraft separation minimums will significantly increase the airspace capacity for the region.
A key player in the FAA's Collaborative Air Traffic Management Technologies program, the Volpe Center develops automated decision support tools and evaluates new technologies that create common air traffic situational awareness among the FAA traffic managers, air carriers, and other users of the National Airspace System. Volpe Center recently deployed the Airspace Flow Program, allowing FAA personnel to deal with congestion in en-route airspace, and is currently developing the Re-Route Impact Assessment tool to allow traffic managers to determine pre-departure re-routes around adverse weather conditions or other factors that cause congestion.
Through its wake turbulence research and recommendations to improve terminal air traffic safety and capacity, Volpe Center helped achieve a recent national rule change to allow a low-visibility arrival method for closely-spaced parallel runways (CSPR). Where CSPR is in use at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, the resulting perrunway capacity increase has provided a critical enhancement to the airport's arrival operations.
On behalf of the FAA, Volpe Center is leading the development effort of the Terminal Data Distribution System and hosting the Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS), facilitating the exchange of critical flight information as part of the System Wide Information Management (SWIM). With ITWS, Volpe Center successfully developed and delivered the first SWIM-compliant weather data feed, enabling traffic managers to adjust flight patterns at ITWS-equipped airports to accommodate changes in weather conditions.
Volpe Center is leading the design, development and maintenance of the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT), which calculates noise, fuel burn and emissions at the flight, airport, regional, national and global levels. AEDT is being used to evaluate the environmental impacts of introducing a wide range of vehicle technologies into the National Airspace System. The Volpe team is working on optimized profile descent, a procedure by which controllers can clear pilots for smooth landing paths instead of stepped descents, reducing noise, fuel burn, and emissions.
Volpe Center's human factors researchers focus on the human side of NextGen implementation. They study how today's pilots, air traffic controllers, and air traffic managers gather and share information and how new systems can be designed to maintain and improve current levels of safety.
