Roundtable #4 on Aeronautics

Key Technical Challenges

Col. David Rhodes, Shared Situation Awareness IPT
Doug Arbuckle, Agile Air Traffic System IPT

Decadal Survey of Civil Aeronautics:

Panel D Second Meeting
The National Academies
November 15, 2005
Post-meeting Revision
 2025 NGATS Concept
Operating Principles
• “It’s about the users…”
• System-wide transformation
• Prognostic approach to safety
assessment
• Globally harmonized
• Environmentally compatible
to enable continued growth

Key Capabilities
• Net-Enabled Information Access
• Performance-Based Services
• Weather-Assimilated Decision
Making
• Layered, Adaptive Security
• Broad-Area Precision Navigation
• Trajectory-Based Aircraft
Operations
• “Equivalent Visual” Operations
• “Super Density” Operations

2
 System-Wide Transformation
Innovation Across All Lines of Development

Policy Change/Creation
Organizational Innovation
Culture Acceptance
Organization

Organization
Policy Culture

Policy Culture

Technology

Technology
Technology
Innovation

3
 Technical Challenges - 1
• Sensors and systems for non-cooperative surveillance over
extended CONUS
• Improved scheduling, reporting & tracking technologies to
maximize shared use airspace in real time
• Correlation tool(s) to compare cooperative surveillance data
with non-cooperative surveillance data, enabling rapid
identification of anomalies
• Improved data flow automation and knowledge processing
• More efficient technology for automatically reducing information
classification
• Affordable, reliable and secure 2-way air-ground data link
– “broadband speed and time-critical delivery requirements
• Improved collaboration tools and processes providing all users
access to data as needed

4
 Technical Challenges - 2
• Explicit approaches for integrating technical innovation and
organizational/cultural/policy innovation
• Methods for assessing risk/safety in Required Total System
Performance framework and for different services levels,
including transitions across service levels
• Broad-area navigation accurate enough to enable takeoff,
landing and taxi with no visual references (accuracy, continuity,
integrity requirements)
• Reliable Wake Vortex prediction and use in dynamic spacing
arrival/departure planning
• Risk prediction for large-scale systems with new operational
paradigms

5
 Technical Challenges - 3
• Appropriate allocation of ATM System functions between:
– automation and humans (humans to maintain awareness of
situation according to responsibility)
– aircraft operators and ‘central’ service provider
• Use of probabilistic information (including and especially
weather) in a management-by-trajectory framework to define
“incompatible trajectories” for traffic flow management
• Methodologies for quickly designing/altering airspace
configurations to “best” accommodate user trajectories, then
reconfiguring airspace dynamically during daily operations
• “Real-time” 4D trajectory calculations to meet multiple
objectives (separation assurance, time, fuel efficiency, low-
noise, low-NOX, low-CO2, stabilized approach transitions, etc)

6
 Technical Challenges - 4
• Seamless incorporation of IT advances in aviation systems
• Meeting life-critical requirements while using “COTS” or
“COTS-like” components
• Cost-effective, highly-reliable software engineering
• Design for “plug & play” and/or extendible functionality
(“upgrades” and new “applications” can be added after initial
design)
• “Design-based” certification in lieu of “test-based” certification
• Design/certification of integrated “mission-critical systems”
with air/ground elements
• Systems engineering for mission-critical, complex “virtual”
systems (sometimes called “system of systems”)

7
 Concluding Remarks
• Defining “boundary” of “system” increasingly
problematic
– Can our design and certification methodologies cope?
• DoD is “pathfinder” for many technologies that end
up in civil application
– Historic examples: radar, jet engine, GPS, net-centric ops
– Within many Federal Government R&D organizations
(including NASA), this “value chain” appears to be broken