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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.
1st this was done 4 years ago. The future is now.
But mostly...
Why were none of the tests more than 4 hours long? What happens after the test period, do they need to recover or something?
If this is so efficient why are we talking about a 4 year old test instead of the implementation 3 years ago?!?
When the choice us between saving 100 lbs of fuel (possibly savings for some other airline) or declaring an on-time departure because you've pulled back from the gate, which do you think the airlines are going to choose? Hint: they have to pay flight crew from the time the door closes today and they have been choosing to pay their employees more rather than sit longer at the gate.