Air traffic management of the future
How Leidos can help FAA evolve with the national airspace system
Why it matters
- Air traffic is growing and evolving and needs more efficient management
- A centralized information system helps controllers manage increasingly crowded skies
- System modernization helps to safely accommodate future aircraft types
For every aircraft traveling across the U.S. national airspace system (NAS), there’s an intricate series of handoffs among air traffic controllers and information systems spread across numerous facilities guiding it to its destination. While the NAS remains one of the world’s safest, this sector-by-sector way of overseeing air traffic is facing greater load stress, logistical complexity and data demands.
"Controllers have a very tough job," said Doug Lieberman, Leidos vice president and chief technology officer for air traffic. “The mental processing they have to do is astounding. So, the goal is to reduce that cognitive load.”
As the NAS grows and evolves, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seeks to unify two of its main air traffic control systems with a single Common Automation Platform to help controllers across the nation more efficiently sequence, track and keep aircraft safely separated.
One of those is the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS), which supports controllers on arrival and departure operations at airport control towers as well as Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities. The other is the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system, which helps controllers at Air Route Traffic Control Centers track high-altitude flights.
How the evolving airspace system is redefining needs
Among FAA’s other needs for the new platform are improved visibility of the airspace, seamless data sharing and continuous adaptability to integrate advanced air traffic management methodologies. A better planned, organized and agile NAS increases safety while reducing aircraft congestion, delays for travelers, fuel burn for carriers and emissions.
The airspace also needs to be ready for new entrants, including advanced air mobility (AAM) vehicles. These include electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxis and drones that will serve local and regional transport and shipping needs, in what FAA is calling a new era of aviation.
"The future of the NAS is that control will be done from a holistic standpoint across the entire airspace, so that we're optimizing the entire gate-to-gate experience," Lieberman said.
The future of the national airspace system is that control will be done from a holistic standpoint, so that we're optimizing the entire gate-to-gate experience.
Doug Lieberman
Leidos Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Air Traffic
Leidos responds to the Common Automation Platform
Leidos built and has maintained ERAM, which it calls the “heart” of the NAS, for more than 20 years. Building on that experience, the company has developed the Leidos Common Automation Platform, or L-CAP, designed to bring together ERAM and STARS functionality and data within a modern and common architecture.
L-CAP can also provide oceanic air traffic control. That’s currently supported by the Advanced Technologies and Oceanic Procedures (ATOP) system. Leidos developed and supports ATOP for FAA, whose controllers use it to provide services for aircraft flying in U.S.-controlled airspace over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.
With L-CAP among the solutions under agency consideration, Michael Hawthorne, Leidos’ FAA account manager, noted that combining the functions of ATOP along with those of ERAM and STARS “extends the benefits of common functionality and a singular data platform across substantially all of U.S.-controlled airspace.”
Going from air traffic control to management
Shared situational awareness is increasingly important as air traffic volumes grow. Unifying operational information will help control facilities across the country coordinate decisions for aircraft and reduce demand-to-capacity imbalances. Optimal traffic movements translate to less time spent in a plane either on the ground or in the air.
That’s the premise behind the “evolution away from air traffic control and toward air traffic management,” Hawthorne remarked.
“L-CAP is really enabling aviation’s future because one of its key aspects is the unified data platform,” Lieberman said.
The platform would address one of U.S. aviation's longstanding challenges: data tied to individual systems or facilities. Breaking down those silos can clear the path for new ways to leverage enroute, terminal and tower data, like using AI-assisted traffic prediction capabilities that can improve route planning and identify potential issues faster.
“We expect to be able to do optimizations that we haven’t done before,” Lieberman noted, “because we’ll be able to feed data into AI-enabled analytical engines.”
The potential to support more capabilities
L-CAP also provides a foundation for innovation by enabling an ecosystem approach to evolve capabilities for air traffic management, according to Hawthorne and Lieberman.
The platform’s flexible architecture would enable FAA to add purpose-built capabilities from Leidos or any of the agency’s industry partners and then update or replace them more easily. It also means that FAA won’t be locked into existing paradigms of airspace control.
“L-CAP gives FAA the flexibility to define how it wants to manage air traffic,” Lieberman said. “By separating operational policies and airspace constructs from underlying technologies, the platform can evolve without requiring extensive recoding, much like a smartphone operating system is a platform upon which developers can add new applications and enhance capabilities."
Reducing the burden on controllers
Controllers actively oversee all flights that fly through their sectors in the airspace, which could be a couple dozen at a time. They deal with enormous amounts of information while making time-critical decisions and regularly checking in with the cockpits of each aircraft.
Addressing controllers’ workloads and cognitive burden is a major FAA objective. The agency is implementing newer methodologies such as trajectory-based operations (TBO), while concepts such as management-by-exception offer potential paths toward reducing routine controller interventions.
TBO is a methodology where flights are managed according to not only latitude, longitude and altitude but also time. Time Based Flow Management (TBFM) is a specific TBO system that Leidos developed for FAA. It analyzes numerous real-time conditions including weather, airspace congestion and airport capacity to more strategically plan routes for planes starting from their departure points. TBFM is also used to meter aircraft along their flight paths, helping to ensure that there will be airspace and runways available when they arrive.
How newer management methodologies can aid future needs
TBFM is designed to help reduce the reactive flight calculations, routing and interventions controllers currently perform. It can be combined with management-by-exception to reduce “routine and repetitive communication and potential miscommunication between controllers and pilots,” Hawthorne noted, while “optimizing flight paths by not limiting them to a preconceived airspace structure.”
Lieberman said management-by-exception “turns on its head” the way controllers are handling flights.
“Going to exception-based routing, controllers would only need to interact with an aircraft when there’s a deviation,” he said. “That’s how we could move from air traffic control to air traffic management.”
That ability to evolve will become increasingly important as new entrants to the airspace introduce different operating patterns and demands. FAA has a pilot program to explore the integration of eVTOL aircraft and other types of AAM vehicles into the NAS.
“When you have eVTOLs moving people from Baltimore to Philadelphia, they could impact that regional airspace and disrupt the classic model of the way airlines work,” Lieberman noted. “We expect to see the aviation system realign.”
He and Hawthorne say that L-CAP can give FAA a flexible foundation to address today’s operational needs and evolve with future NAS requirements.
Three things to remember
- A unified air traffic platform can improve safety, efficiency and shared situational awareness.
- Modern air traffic management can reduce controller workload, congestion and flight delays.
- A flexible platform can support growing traffic, AI assistance and advanced air mobility.
