Future ATM Operational Concepts

The National Airspace System (NAS) is a vastly distributed system consisting of many decision makers, some of whom are competing agents. Metron Aviation provides assessment of air transportation issues and inefficiencies to identify new procedures, concepts and associated technology requirements. Leveraging off lessons learned, Metron Aviation applies domain knowledge and distributed planning sciences to synthesize future operational concepts and produce system wide solutions for clients.

Weather is a major limiting factor in the NAS today, accounting for roughly 65% of all traffic delays. For the future, the capacity of the NAS is ultimately limited to its ability to accommodate safe and efficient travel under all weather conditions across all domains (surface, terminal area, and en route). To this end, Metron Aviation is in the process of designing the All Weather Capacity Increasing Concept for the NAS for the year 2020. The concept describes:

Flexible traffic management around weather constraints (e.g, we describe how jet routes (the highways in the sky) will be redefined hourly in real time to define new routes that avoid weather as weather constraints change)

Coupled weather and traffic prediction (e.g., our algorithms look ahead of aircraft and estimate the amount of time needed for weather avoidance)

Shared situation awareness through coordination, collaboration, and fused weather and traffic information (e.g., we identify types of interfaces, roles, responsibilities, and procedures that support effective decision-making during weather impacted conditions in the NAS)

Metron Aviation is developing a “Technology Roadmap” which describes how the future will unfold to transition from our current NAS and supporting technology to this future vision of the NAS.

Transition Airspace "Variable" Jet Routes

High Capacity, Low Complexity Flow Constrained Areas (FCAs)

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