Technical Interchange with FAA for NASA Weather Routing Technologies
January 29, 2016
NASA Ames Research Center hosted a two-day technical interchange meeting with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) NextGen organization, as well as Mitre's Center for Advanced Aviation Systems Development (CAASD), January 20-21, 2016. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss NASA's current weather routing research capabilities, including Dynamic Weather Routes (DWR) automation, for potential FAA deployment under the Collaborative Air Traffic Management Work Package 5 (CATM-WP5) scheduled for a FAA Final Investment Decision (FID) in 2019 and National Airspace System (NAS) deployment in about 2021. The FAA and NASA exchanged technical concepts, test results, and in a government-only meeting, discussed future research towards real-time trajectory automation to improve weather avoidance routes and reduce delay during convective weather events in the NAS. The FAA described their requirements preparing for the FID package, and expressed interest in DWR follow-on research, including common high-value reroutes for multiple flights, and automation to enable time-based metering when weather impacts arrival flows to capacity constrained airports. (POC: Dave McNally)