Chapter 1 Air Transportation: Irregular Operations and Control

Abstract

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses problems related to the management of air traffic and airline operations for minimizing the impact and cost of disruptions. Flight and crew schedules and passenger itineraries have become increasingly fragile because of the growing complexity of the air transportation system and the tight coupling of its various elements. The resulting direct and indirect economic costs are very large, certainly amounting to several billion dollars annually. The airline industry has a vital stake in research aimed at mitigating the effects of severe weather and other disruptive events and at expediting recovery from irregular operations. A significant body of recent and ongoing work has led to major progress toward these objectives. Two breakthrough developments have been the primary drivers behind this progress. First, collaborative decision making has made it possible to apply the principles of information sharing and distributed decision making to air traffic flow management (ATFM) by expanding the databases available to airline and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) traffic flow managers, by creating common situational awareness, and by introducing shared real-time tools and procedures. Second, there is growing recognition in the airline industry of the fact that planning for schedule robustness and reliability may be just as important as planning for minimizing costs in the complex, highly stochastic, and dynamic environment of air transportation.