Flow Constrained Area Airspace Capacity Estimator
Ability to create and modify existing Flow Constrained Areas
The existing process for defining the location and rates for Flow Constrained Areas (FCA) is typically limited to a set of predefined FCAs, often along the boundary joining adjacent Air Route Traffic Control Centers (ARTCC). Rates for these FCAs are stored in a static lookup table, and are based on a past study of historic throughput across specific regions of airspace. A primary difficulty in branching out to creating customized FCAs that more accurately align with en route weather constraints, is the current lack of rate setting guidance for non-standard FCAs. The FCA Airspace Capacity Estimator (FACE) concept will give Traffic Managers (TM) the ability to draw new FCAs or modify existing “canned” FCAs using a point-and-click, map-based interface.
A key innovation of FACE is that it will offer improved decision support by providing rate-setting guidance for user-defined FCAs, through integration with a pre-computed database of historic airspace usage statistics. This database will provide the user with a range of historically observed rates for any arbitrary FCA. Filters will be available in FACE for querying historic rate information based on departure/arrival airport, departure/arrival center and flights crossing the FCA within a certain altitude range.
