Air Traffic Management (ATM) Capacity-Increasing Concept

Domain: Gate-to-Gate
Principle Investigator: Boeing

The predominant purpose of a future Air Traffic Management (ATM) system is to enable users of domestic, oceanic and international airspace to achieve their transport objectives in a safe, timely, and affordable manner. This system must consider the needs of all potential stakeholders such as commercial airlines, cargo carriers, general aviation, military users, and service providers. Many parts of the system are at, or very near, capacity and cannot be readily expanded to accommodate the traffic demands of the future.

A next generation air traffic management system is required to sustain the continued growth of air travel. This system must dramatically increase capacity and throughput, reduce delays, and enhance safety and security while remaining accessible and affordable for all users. The system must provide comprehensive air traffic management functionality for all phases of flight and ground operations, and it must be globally interoperable. The system must also provide harmonized communication, navigation, and surveillance services, and its design must be based on open architecture principles to accommodate affordably any future technological innovations or requirements changes and to facilitate expansion in global applications.

The Boeing ATM organization is committed to a disciplined systems engineering approach that is necessary to construct an ATM system that is capable of meeting the objectives referred to above. A vital contribution to this disciplined approach is identifying the user needs of a future ATM system, an activity that is the primary charter of Boeing's ATM Working Together Team efforts. The user needs drive the feedback that exists between the operational concept, system requirements, and system architecture definition activities that are part of the systems engineering approach Boeing is following.

Boeing ATM believes a fundamental paradigm underlying a modernized air traffic management system is one that moves from relative-spacing of aircraft to an approach that uses time-based control. The flight trajectory is the fundamental mechanism required to make this transformation. Time-based control allows precision estimation of aircraft future state and enables automation that is unavailable today.

A much more integrated data distribution system is needed to allow system planners at all levels (time frames) to reliably and expeditiously access data reflecting current and future system status. New airspace constructs and procedures must be integrated with trajectory-based air traffic control to enable increased span of control by agents, plan stabilization, and coordination of the re-planning process. Flow, traffic, and separation planning must be integrated into a seamless set of services that interoperate to most efficiently utilize system resources.

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