UAS in The NAS for Simulation Modeling

Abstract

The Federal Aviation Administration's Office of NextGen Division of Systems Analysis and Modeling estimates the long-term operational impacts and future benefits of planned National Airspace System (NAS) initiatives, including the impact of emerging new systems in the NAS. To estimate future benefits, we use a fast-time simulation model of the entire NAS with future projected flight schedules. In order to model the effects of emerging Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) operations in our simulation, we create hypothetical UAS flight plans based on historical UAS flights. Our fast-time simulation requires flight plans with entire 4-D trajectories, origin and destination airports, wheels-off and wheels-on times, a sequence of latitude and longitude pairs specifying the route of flight, and aircraft performance characteristics. To develop these flight plans, we identified UAS traffic from historical radar data by call sign, aircraft type, and other indicators of UAS flights. Then we filtered the identified UAS traffic to select only those that entered controlled airspace. This briefing will present an overview of recent trends in UAS operations in controlled airspace, including trends in operation counts, geographical locale, and altitude band. Finally, we present findings from initial simulation runs used to estimate the impact of historical UAS on traditional traffic in controlled airspace.