Publications

This document provides an overview of MIT Lincoln Laboratory's activities in support of the interim stage of the Initial Investment Decision benefits assessment for the Tower Flight Data Manager. It outlines the rationale for the focus areas, and the background, methodology, and scope in the focus areas of departure metering, sequence optimization, airport configuration optimization, and safety assessment. Estimates of the potential benefits enabled by TFDM deployment are presented for each of these areas for a subset of airports and conditions considered within the scope of the analyses. These benefits are monetized where possible. Recommendations for follow-on work, for example, to support future benefits assessment efforts for TFDM, are also discussed.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) utilizes a formal investment analysis process to support the development, procurement and deployment of new air traffic control technologies. It is often unclear how to estimate the impacts of a new technology on aviation safety, both in terms of the probability that incidents and accidents could be prevented and in terms of the potential financial savings associated with reduced aircraft damage and personal injuries. With this in mind, the focus of this paper is twofold: (1) demonstrating the application of a method for generating probabilistic estimates of safety benefits for a future air traffic control technology, and (2) monetizing and extrapolating safety impacts from historical data to provide a quantitative estimate of savings over the lifetime of a new technology. The technologies explored in this analysis involve electronic flight data, enhanced surveillance and decision support tools for the air traffic control tower environment. From this initial analysis, the estimated total monetizable safety benefit of deploying all of these capabilities in a new system with an expected 2015-2035 lifetime across a set of major airports in the US ranges from $155 million to $2.1 billion. Implications of key data assumptions driving the lower and upper-bound estimates are discussed.

Improvements to current air traffic management technologies and techniques are required to move toward the next generation air transportation system (NextGen). The Tower Flight Data Manager (TFDM) is a prototype air traffic control system consisting of the: (1) Flight Data Manager (FDM) facilitating interaction with electronic flight data, (2) Tower Information Display System (TIDS) providing enhanced surveillance information, and (3) Supervisor Display providing a means for front line managers and traffic management coordinators to interact with strategic and tactical planning and decision support tools. Given that TFDM aims to enable safe and efficient operations under NextGen, it is critical to analyze potential safety impacts and determine what types of real-world safety issues can be prevented or mitigated by TFDM. With this goal in mind, we reviewed 560 National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and Aviation Safety Reporting System (ASRS) reports focusing on commercial air carrier operations over a five year period. Over 100 reports were deemed relevant to TFDM and further analyzed to determine the likelihood that these safety-related events could have been mitigated or prevented by the key TFDM capabilities outlined above. A systematic method for generating probabilistic estimates of benefits for a technology not yet deployed was utilized to produce effectiveness ratings for the various TFDM components.