14,218 Flights Over the U.S.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) is a computer generated animated depiction of airline flights over the United States from late night March 19th to early morning March 21st 2005. The work was created by artist Aaron Koblin based on data collected from the Federal Aviation Administration. In the movie, a frame of which is seen here, the bright blob towards the lower left is Hawaii, the bright blob just upper left of center is Southern California, and the lines comming into frame from upper right are trans Atlantic flights. Several different methods for displaying this same set of air traffic data can be seen in Koblin's YouTube video. For the entire month of March 2005 the Bureau of Transportation Statistics reports 996,240 revenue departures.

Next-Gen Aviation - Coming sooner than later?

Photo courtesy of ITT

The poor conditions of our air traffic control towers is nothing new. People have been talking about the next generation of aviation for quite some time, but Aviation Week reports that Next-Gen systems might be closer than before:

Better late than never -- even if never was never really an option -- regulators are moving to define and accelerate the shift toward surveillance and navigation based on satellite systems. The United States is further along on the surveillance part, known as Automatic Dependent Surveillance - Broadcast (ADS-B) Out, with FAA's proposed rule (O&M, Nov. 2007, p. 19), while Europe's SESAR (Single European Sky ATM Research) group is further advanced on datalink communications. Both Europe and the U.S. clearly are moving toward the same goal, although the pace and emphasis during the transition to next-generation traffic management still must be worked out.

The article goes on to describe a number of factors pressuring the industry to switch over. As oil prices continue to rise and more people are starting to worry about carbon emissions and global warming, any Next-Gen system should increase system efficiency and reduce fuel costs and flight times.

A New Way To Push Tin

The Daily Cal reports that ITS Berkeley a grant from NASA to improve the nation's air traffic control system. From the article:

The campus Institute of Transportation Studies will receive $502,000 for each of two years to evaluate possible methods of relieving the nation’s overburdened aviation system.

Mark Hansen, professor of civil and environmental engineering, will be the principal investigator for the project, along with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Maryland, College Park.

Hansen said that currently air traffic controllers are often unable to predict exact arrival times of aircraft, leading to delays and causing aircraft to circle above airports because of traffic backup on the ground.

“We are studying a new case in which each airplane arrives at the airport at a specific time,” Hansen said.

There have been many criticisms of the current air traffic control system: It's out dated because they still use strips of paper (ACM, registration required). It's overburdened. Some also say the current system can be unsafe.

In response, the FAA has announced the launch of a GPS based air traffic control system. A GPS based system is certainly safer than a Buddhist based system.

Feds to Stop Baller Blocking ATC

NPR reports that the United States federal government has approved a US$1 billion spending package to "begin modernizing the nation's air traffic control system." If you have Ebsco you can view a more detailed explanation of what those in the know call ADS-B (short for Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast). Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on the matter as well.

I myself will remain skeptical of the claims that by modernization and consequent increases in capacity there will also be an improvement in on-time performance.