On cool and clear afternoons in the San Francisco Bay

Area, I often see jet contrails going north to south. I imagine

passengers jets from East Asia or cargo jets from Anchorage,

Alaska flying to Los Angeles (LAX). While it would be logical to

assume these lines trace straight line paths between airports,

aircraft fly slightly crooked paths through a series of

predetermined way points. These airways are analogous to a

highway system crossing the continent by linking major cities

along the way.

Like the U.S. Interstate

Highway System, air traffic control systems are based on 50-year

old technologies, in the case of air traffic control,

ground-based radars and voice communications over

radio.

Ground-based

radar antennas rotate 5 or 12 times per minute "pinging" aircraft

every 12 seconds (or 5 seconds near airports). It is thus

possible for aircraft to be miles away from where the controllers

think they are. As a consequence, aircraft must be spaced 3-5

miles apart (horizontally).

Air traffic

communications have not kept up with digital communications

technology. Controllers still issue mundane commands like,

"Descend to five thousand (feet)," "Fly heading 270 (fly due

west)," and "Reduce speed to 180 (knots)." Furthermore, pilots

rely on air traffic controllers to advise them of nearby

aircraft.

Meanwhile, higher fuel expenses are

motivating the aerospace industry and airlines to experiment with

new technologies and procedures because more efficient flying

means lower fuel burn, and fuel is the biggest or second largest

expense for airlines.

In the United States, a

large air cargo carrier uses Automatic Dependent

Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) to exchange GPS data with other

aircraft in their fleet. Pilots can track the position and

direction of similarly equipped aircraft, just like a marine

radar on any passenger ship. This is especially useful every

night when about one hundred aircraft converge on their hub

airport in a narrow time window. Without the positional awareness

made possible by ADS-B, disruptions, such as storms, cause

traffic jams in the air, forcing them to fly in circles while

waiting for their turn to land. With ADS-B units in the cockpit,

pilots can space themselves prior to arrival, thus reducing

congestion at the hub airport and saving fuel.

Over the Pacific Ocean, the ASPIRE (Asia Pacific

Initiative to Reduce Emissions) is testing operational

optimizations to burn less fuel on transpacific flights. ASPIRE

flights are allowed to take advantage of every optimization

during their oceanic flights, most importantly greater freedom to

change their altitude and heading based on actually encountered

atmospheric conditions, as opposed to conditions forecast hours

before flight. This is enabled by precision navigation (GPS) and

better air-ground communications. On a recent ASPIRE flight, a

747 flying from LAX to Singapore, via Narita, Japan burned 10,868

kg less fuel, while emitting 33,769 kg less CO2 (carbon

dioxide).

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)

present new challenges to air traffic management (ATM). In

Europe, the ATLANTIDA initiative (Application of Leading

Technologies to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Research and

Development in ATM) is tackling the challenge of applying

Trajectory-Based Operations (TBO) to air traffic management (ATM)

for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV). Instead of human air traffic

controllers proactively controlling aircraft movements, which is

especially challenging with unmanned vehicles, TBO takes aircraft

trajectory data and computes optimal solutions and presents

decisions to the air traffic controller. ATLANTIDA uses a

net-centric service-oriented architecture along with a novel

trajectory definition technology called Aircraft Intent

Description Language (AIDL) to capture and distribute trajectory

data, and has selected RTI Data Distribution Service for its

implementation.

The benefits of better air

traffic control and management are more efficient flying and

lower fuel burn. Consequently emissions are lower. RTI is playing

a role in the future of air traffic management and helping the

world be a little greener.

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