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Designing Tomorrow's Air Traffic Control Systems
aarondubrow writes According to FAA estimates, increasing congestion in the air transportation system of the United States, if unaddressed, will cost the American economy $22 billion annually in lost economic activity by 2022. MIT researcher Hamsa Balakrishnan and her team are making air traffic control systems more efficient through a combination of better models and new embedded technologies. Testing their algorithms at Logan Airport in Boston, they showed that by holding aircraft back for 4.5 minutes, they could improve flow on the runways and save nearly 100 pounds of fuel for each aircraft.
building in some redundant backups so that what happened in Chicago last month doesn't happen again?
Can you say "Economics"? Airlines are corporations. Corporations exist to return profits to their investors. Fewer hubs = lower people and equipment expense = higher profit. Seems we used to do it that way - but that was when the airline routes were REGULATED for the public good ... that went by the board as soon as they got enough congressmen in their pockets. God (or the deity of your choice) forbid we should worry about providing public services that work and are convenient and useful. (Gets down off the corner soap box).
The US government should sell the air traffic control system to the highest bidder. That would probably be a consortium of the major airports and airlines. Any system run by bureaucratic management will necessarily be way behind the times technologically. The air traffic control system needs to be operated as a business, not a bureaucracy.