From VIPs to Volcanoes, Aviation Tools Enhance Planning Across the Skies New, data-driven tools developed by MITRE are helping the FAA and the aviation industry collaboratively plan for the constantly shifting conditions affecting traffic flows in our National Airspace System.
The MITRE Corporation The National Airspace System (NAS) is more complicated than the average passenger realizes. Aside from the complexities of normal operations, consider the additional constraints the system faces daily: Snow, hurricanes, and thunderstorms can shut down air traffic in an entire region, and weather paths are unpredictable. Special events can create airport congestion that ripples through the system. During rocket launches, airspace must be blocked to other traffic to ensure safety. Additionally, for security reasons, the President’s travels on Air Force One require other air traffic to be grounded or rerouted, and the President’s schedule can change at a moment’s notice. Other VIP movements, airport construction projects, and even active volcanoes on another continent can affect air traffic flows as well. At MITRE, we’ve created data-driven tools to support the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), airlines, and other aviation industry stakeholders in planning for such constraints. Developed by engineers in the R&D Center MITRE operates for the FAA, the tools help everyone involved stay on top of ever-changing challenges in the NAS.
“A few years ago, the FAA put in place a process to address system constraints, assess the effectiveness of the measures implemented to address them, and then institute improvements in future planning and execution efforts,” says Bill Bateman, MITRE’s FAA liaison on operational performance projects. “It’s called PERTI, short for Planning, Execution, Review, Train, and Improve.” “What we’ve done is work collaboratively with planners at the FAA’s Command Center to automate some of those processes,” adds Mike Klinker, a systems engineer focused on operations optimization. “We’ve also provided mechanisms and visualizations to help the FAA and the aviation industry communicate and collaborate more effectively. And we’re capturing data so that the FAA can better assess how effective its planning was and learn from those experiences.”
Introducing Automation and Data Capture These improvements come in the form of two interrelated tools—the PERTI Continuous Planner and the NAS Operations Dashboard (NOD).
