Sep

MIT Brainiacs Cutting Air Traffic Weather Delays

Posted by admin Published in Air Travel

Some of the world’s greatest academic minds have come together to solve one of the most confounding problems of our times: how to reduce air traffic delays at our gridlocked airports.

Researchers at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory have developed the Route Availability Planning Tool to untangle the delays that inevitably occur when planes come across poor weather. RAPT compiles weather notes from multiple sources, crunches it to predict which flight paths are most likely to clear as the storm passes and displays the info in an easy-to-read interface that allows air traffic controllers to produce decisions quickly.

It’s light years ahead of the current system, which amounts to little more than air traffic controllers using their best guess and hoping it works out. Beta examining shows the system works, too — it’s already cut delays at New York airports by 2,300 hours.

The RAPT display shows an airport with lines radiating outward to indicate departure routes. A grid below the map lists the different routes in rows, and uses the columns to cut each row into five minute intervals. Each block color-coded according to the weather planes can expect to come across on that path. whether a controller sees that flight path one is green at 10:45 but next turns red at 10:50, he knows he has five minutes to get some planes into the air.

RAPT is fairly a departure (bad pun

intended) from the current system, in which an air traffic controller weather knowledge from multiple sources and must create a mental picture to determine how it will affect different flight paths. whether things are getting poor and there are several flights in the air and on the ground, the controller might become overwhelmed and simply hold all flights until the weather has improved. A handful of delayed flights might not sound like a big deal, but it can be. Studies by Lincoln Lab show getting just two or three more planes in the air during a storm at a crowded airport can keep a domino effect of delays from spreading all through the nation.

A RAPT prototype is being tested in New York, and Lincoln Lab says it’s already proving itself. Delays in the New York City region have been cut by 2,300 hours, which equals $7.5 million in operational cost savings. MIT estimates that whether the system is fully implemented in New York, it could save up to 8,800 hours per year, or $28 million.

Multiply that by the 20 air traffic regions in the US, and you’re talking a lot of money saved. And hopefully, a lot fewer delays.

Screenshot: MIT/Lincoln Laboratory.

Original post by Dave Demerjian