Air Traffic Management Concept Baseline Definition - The Boeing ...

Executive Summary
This report presents an operational concept for the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS)
through the year 2015, including a transition path from the current system. This concept
was developed by Boeing Commercial Airplane Group for NASA’s Advanced Air
Transportation Technologies (AATT) program, under subcontract with NEXTOR
(National Center of Excellence for Aviation Operations Research).
The operational concept presented here is aimed at driving research to support preliminary
design decisions for the NAS, which will produce top level technical and human factors
requirements to achieve the system mission. Detailed concept validation research must
then be performed, where technology and human factors will be combined with economic
evaluation of concept components to fully define the operational concept and architecture.
Thus, the concept presented here, although well supported by rationale as to what might
be feasible in the next two decades, must be subjected to critical analysis and validation.
A companion report presents the results of a survey of NAS stakeholder needs, conducted
May-August 1997, which details stakeholders’ concerns about terminal area capacity and
access to airspace through 2015. Stakeholders also expressed the need to maintain or
improve safety in the NAS, and a need for increased emphasis on human factors research.
This report discusses the various factors that can force change in the NAS, and develops a
rationale for considering traffic growth as the primary driver for the ATM operational
concept. The NAS mission goals are defined in terms of safety, capacity and efficiency,
and a scenario is presented that predicts NAS traffic gridlock by 2006, where the terminal
area will be the primary choke point. If not averted, this will make current airline hubbing
operations infeasible, lead to escalation of operating costs and constrain economic growth.
This scenario is used as the basis for the operational concept, and high density operations
are emphasized in the report.
Highlights of the concept evolution presented in this report are:
1. Airspace will be configured to support a certain density of operation, ranging from
high to low, through dynamic partitioning.
2. Access to airspace will be based on the required system performance for the airspace
operation. A given aircraft will be qualified to a maximum Required System
Performance (RSP) level in which it can operate. RSP is developed by considering
ATM-related safety through an analysis of collision risk for the overall separation
assurance function.
3. A uniform CNS infrastructure performance is assumed to be provided throughout the
NAS, except for Category II-III landing and surface operations.
4. High density separation services will be provided neither by procedural nor radar
separation, but by a new precision form of separation assurance. This will allow
system throughput to be maximized where shared precision trajectory intent and a
universal time reference are assumed.
5. Low density separation services will be provided in other airspace, where user freedom
to select and modify the flight trajectory is allowed.
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