Analysis of Special Activity Airspace for Air Traffic Management

Abstract

In today’s system, air traffic management decisions are often made in the absence of realtime special activity airspace (SAA) status information. Hence, planned routes for flights often avoid the SAA when, in fact, the SAA is inactive at the time the flight is projected to cross the SAA. This avoidance may prove expensive in terms of flight time and distance, consequently impacting fuel burn and economic objectives. Through improved situational awareness and information sharing, the Next Generation Air Transportation System is expected to provide flight planners with dynamic SAA status updates. Improved knowledge of SAA availability may allow flights to plan direct routes through an SAA. In this paper, we model the impact of special use airspace (SUA), a subset of SAA, on flight trajectories in the national airspace system, and quantify benefits of improved airspace availability on flight times and distance. Using detailed SAA activity data and flight trajectory simulations, we analyze several future air traffic scenarios to quantify these benefits. Results suggest that while SUAs may impact only a small proportion of daily flights in the NAS, the savings in total flight time and distance to these specific flights may be substantial. I. Introduction ROWING demand for air travel is expected to increase congestion and delays in the National Airspace System (NAS). The need to balance demand and capacity while maintaining or enhancing efficiency and safety is, hence, of interest to multiple stakeholders. The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), an ongoing effort to transform the NAS in the mid-term and beyond, aims to accommodate the increased demand of future years. Among a wide variety of capabilities, NextGen aims to provide improved situational awareness for both strategic and tactical air traffic management decisions. NextGen improvements influence both the user and service provider domains. An effective transition to NextGen is possible, when the impact of these improvements on NAS stakeholder objectives is understood. In this paper, we present an analysis of special activity airspace (SAA) for air traffic management (ATM). In today’s system, SAA status updates may not be readily available to flight planners. Through information sharing, NextGen accounts for real-time SAA status information, enabling efficient ATM decisions. NextGen presents a strong motivation for understanding SAA benefits in the context of flight planning. In this paper, we use detailed SAA location and activity data to analyze the impact of SAA status updates on flight plan trajectories across the NAS. The organization of the paper is as follows: In Section II, we present a brief background and a review of relevant literature. Section III describes the input data for the analysis and Section IV details the method of analysis. We discuss results and observations from the analysis in Section V, and present conclusions and future work in Section VI.