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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.
Make sure the tower doesn't have software written by a company that went out of business, but still managed to get an update that can bring the whole thing down, and employ versioning in your datacenter backups...but if that doesn't work, ensure that copies of the software are uploaded to the planes themselves so that, in the event there's a group of socially awkward geniuses that can drive a Ferrari down a landing strip, they can download the software via an Ethernet cable and save everyone.
building in some redundant backups so that what happened in Chicago last month doesn't happen again?
100 pounds of fuel. ;)
Does this include economic activity lost for the FAA being too shortsighted or too belligerent to have a workable permit system for commercial use of drones in 2014?
99 pounds of fuel on the jet,
99 pounds of fuel,
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?!?
The Economist has a great article on free-routing. Not only does this save time & fuel, but a "continuous descent approach" is also quieter at airports.
I don't care if the plane I'm on departs on time, as long as it arrives on time. I've been in a situation once where changing winds meant that delaying takeoff allowed the plane to land earlier. I don't recall anyone on the flight being upset with the decision to depart a bit later...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That's because Boston isn't utilizing decent surface management software. Busier airports like Atlanta and JFK do, so if you want to do a real study, study an airport that has already addressed this issue. http://www.airtrafficmanagemen... https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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).
"If the FAA was a private corporation this would never be an issue."
Q: Ummmmmm........ yeah. So Mr. AC, what have you been spending your time on?
A: Yeah, I just stare at my desk, but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch too, I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.
Q: this continuity plan you are working on, does it generate any revenue?
A: Not really. I mean if the company gets bought out everyone will be laid off any way so it isn't really a priority. And if the company goes under it doesn't matter much anyway either.
Q: So why are you doing it?
A: Well, management told out client we have a continuity planning committee.
Q: So who reviews these plans?
A: Well we were supposed to have review meetings but first we had to finalize the requirements for the meetings. But that led to more meetings as we realized we really did not know what was supposed to be in the plan.
Q: So the plan is now in the works?
A: No, not really. People got pulled off to help with some other revenue generating projects.
Q: What do you say you do?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
here you go
and more related papers at http://web.mit.edu/hamsa/www/pubs.html
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
People often forget that the first A in NASA stands for aeronautics. They have been hard at work at fully computerizing air traffic control. However as you can imagine this requires lots of testing given the potentially fatal consequences. NASA has held several competition rounds among contractors for the next air traffic control system, providing feedback to all candidates for the next round.
Here is one such paper. There are many others, from various academia and industry consortia. The work they are doing is rather cool.