HAMPTON, Va., 16 July 2010.Air traffic management specialists at the NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., are trying to find ways of safely increasing commercial airport capacity by streamlining operations at airport gates, taxiways, and runways, as well as by blending terminal air traffic control operations at adjacent airports.
NASA Langley's efforts are part of the NASA Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) Airportal project. The NextGen Airportal project seeks to make the most of airport and terminal air space capacity and throughput as part of the NextGen air traffic management system.
NASA Langley announced plans Wednesday to award two NASA Airportal research contracts, one to the Sensis Corp. Seagull Technology Center in Campbell, Calif., and the other to LMI Research Institute in McLean, Va., to develop tools, concepts, algorithms, and simulations to improve how commercial aircraft arrive at, depart from, and operate within airport terminal areas, runways, taxiways, and gates.
The amount of the contracts have not yet been determined. The contracts are entitled NextGen-Airportal Project Technologies: Systems Analysis, Integration, and Evaluation, and NASA is awarding the contracts with money from the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA).
The NextGen-Airportal project focuses on NASAs technical expertise and facilities to enable the highest possible efficiency in the use of gates, taxiways, runways, metroplex airspace, and other Airportal resources. A metroplex is a group of two or more adjacent airports with interdependent arrival and departure operations.
LMI Research will focus on using 4-D trajectories -- or the aircraft path from engine startup to engine shutdown, including the path along the ground -- to plan and carry out systemwide operations, as well as integrating 4-D trajectory operations with safe and efficient surface and terminal area traffic operations.
LMI will emphasize surface traffic, dynamic airport configuration management, advanced technologies to detect and avoid wake vortex hazards, new procedures for safe, closely spaced, and converging approaches in bad weather, and simulating operations at single and multiple regional airports.
Sensis, meanwhile, is focusing on airport safe and efficient surface operations (SESO), coordinated arrival and departure operations management (CADOM), and airportal and metroplex integration (AMI).
SESO conducts research to manage traffic at airport gates, taxiways, and runways safely and efficiently to enable maximum aircraft throughput and capacity. CADOM focuses on making the most of single and multiple airport capacity. AMI focuses on management of metroplex operations.
Sensis will create a cost-benefit assessment of NASA's Airspace Systems Program concepts and technologies, investigate how to integrated these concepts, and design a human in the loop simulation experiment of an integrated operational concept.
For more information contact NASA Langley Research Center online at www.nasa.gov/centers/langley, Sensis Corp. at www.sensis.com, or LMI Research at www.lmi.org.
