FAA Traffic Flow Management (TFM) Deployment Team Meeting
August 12, 2013
The Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA's) TFM Deployment Team meeting was held during the week of July 15, 2013 in Atlantic City, NJ. It was attended by FAA employees, FAA contractors and airline personnel. Dr. Kapil Sheth was invited to the meeting to present recent research that the Aviation Systems Division has been conducting on Miles-in-Trail (MIT) modeling. Particularly, the TFM team was interested in modeling the passback (MIT) restrictions to upstream facilities (Centers), when MIT at a downstream airspace fix is imposed to manage traffic for weather or volume constraints. The current TFM infrastructure has limited MIT modeling and no MIT passback modeling. Currently, traffic managers rely upon their own experience to derive passback values, which can result in inefficient operations. An Air Traffic Control System Command Center Specialist provided positive input that NASA was on the right track with the modeling, and the FAA offered to provide access to two or three specialists to help modify the model to be operationally viable. The FAA has also begun to specify realistic scenarios for testing the MIT passback advisories. (POC: Dr. Kapil Sheth)
Meeting with Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
August 12, 2013
Visitors from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), who are members of the Distributed and Revolutionarily Efficient Air-traffic Management System (DREAMS) project, met with NASA Airspace Systems Program and Project staff and Aviation Systems Division Researchers on August 7-8, 2013 at NASA Ames Research Center. The JAXA team described their research in wake vortex prediction and disaster recovery and relief efforts, while the NASA team shared their work in wake vortex research and environmental modeling. The project teams provided information about the overall research and development efforts and technical challenges within the Concepts and Technology Development (CTD) and System Analysis, Integration and Evaluation (SAIE) projects. Both organizations agreed to continue discussions to investigate specific areas of collaboration.