The spring release of Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) introduced a new traffic management tool, the Airspace Flow Program, which targets delays to those flights whose flight paths traverse airspace affected by severe weather. Pictured: A screenshot of the Airspace Flow Program in use. ETMS is a mission-essential system used by FAA to support its Traffic Flow Management mission and increase air system capacity. It integrates real-time flight and weather data from multiple sources, presenting information graphically in a highly adaptable format, enabling more efficient, predictable, and equitable management of air traffic in congested airspace.

Congestion Reduction: Supporting FAA's Air Traffic Flow Management (TFM)

The National Airspace System (NAS) handles 60,000 flights a day. As the number of air passengers increases every year, reducing aviation congestion while meeting projected demands on the national airspace system is a critical objective of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). To improve the reliability and predictability of air travel and thus increase air system capacity, FAA integrates new technologies and techniques that enable ever more effective responses to changing conditions, such as travel patterns, equipment outages, and weather. Key FAA programs such as Traffic Flow Management and Collaborative Decision Making need automated systems that provide accurate and timely information for all airspace users. One such system is the Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS), developed by the Volpe Center and employed by FAA at more than 80 operational facilities.

ETMS Enables Systematic Approach to Traffic Flow Management

The Volpe Center is responsible for the development and daily operation of ETMS, which FAA uses to:

• track, predict, and plan air traffic flow;
• analyze effects of ground delays; and
• evaluate alternative routing strategies.

ETMS integrates real-time flight and weather data from multiple sources, presenting information graphically in a highly adaptable format, enabling more efficient, predictable, and equitable management of air traffic in congested airspace. As the system continues to evolve and provide new capabilities to air traffic managers, aviation congestion can be tackled in a systematic way that encompasses the entire airspace. ETMS facilitates a common air traffic situational awareness that makes possible collaborative decision making among FAA, NAS users (airlines, business aviation, and general aviation), and military operations.

New ETMS Traffic Management Tool Reduces Severe-Weather Delays

The spring 2006 release of ETMS, Version 8.2, was deployed in early June in time for the 2006 severe weather season. The main new component of ETMS 8.2 is the Airspace Flow Program, a traffic management tool designed to help reduce delays in the air traffic system by targeting delays to those flights whose flight paths traverse airspace impacted by severe weather. The Volpe Center's Traffic Flow Management team was responsible for integrating this new capability into the ETMS system and deploying it on time and within budget.

The Airspace Flow Program combines the power of existing Traffic Flow Management capabilities, including Ground Delay Programs and Flow Constrained Areas, to allow for more efficient, predictable, and equitable management of the National Airspace System. It allows air traffic managers to delay only those flights that are expected to encounter extremely bad weather. As a result, the new program minimizes the crippling effects of the sudden thunderstorms that frequently affect the nation's airspace system during the summer when travel is at its highest.

Under the Airspace Flow Program, air traffic controllers issue expected departure times to aircraft that they anticipate will to pass through airspace affected by bad weather and safely meter them through the constrained area, improving the FAA's ability to respond to severe weather and reducing the number of unnecessary delays and disruptions. Through Collaborative Decision Making, the FAA can provide advance notice on specific flights that would be affected, making it easier for travelers to get advance notice of flight delays.

ETMS Evolves to Optimize New Opportunities

Since 1984, the Volpe Center has been advancing research in Traffic Flow Management. ETMS has evolved out of this research to accommodate FAA needs. Each new release is driven by FAA policy, user requests, and the Volpe Center's knowledge of emerging technologies.

Historically, air traffic analysts have viewed congestion primarily as an "airport problem." Airports were considered the congestion points because, for example, an airport would close runways based on weather. However, many problems are not in the immediate area of one airport; some severe weather disturbances are in the airspace between airports and may affect multiple airports—e.g., a weather system may impact flights heading for multiple airports. At the same time that this newer, systematic perspective was emerging, advances in automation and telecommunications were enabling expansive data gathering and transmitting capabilities, making it possible for ETMS to incorporate ways to relieve airspace congestion. This was an historic change—for the first time air traffic managers could see beyond their own sectors to view the entire airspace.

This new window on the complex nature of air traffic confirmed the need for evolving systems that could collect, integrate, and share data in a variety of ways. Today, ETMS receives direct data feeds from the FAA and NAS users; data are integrated with direct input from several other sources and made available through ETMS and its range of traffic management tools. Some recent additions to the tools available within ETMS include:

• Runway Visual Range: Data system provides real-time information on changing weather conditions at 45 high-activity airports; airlines and the FAA are notified immediately that conditions at the destination airport are improving.
• Reroute Manager Tool and Flow Evaluation Area Tool: Uses 3-D visualization to identify which flights are going through certain areas of the airspace that could be affected by congestion and options to reroute them.
• National "Playbook" Database: Holds prescribed reroutes—weather patterns repeat during a season, year to year, enabling the development of standard approaches to certain weather patterns.

Regular Releases Help to Keep Users Up to Speed

The Volpe Center has deployed a new ETMS release about every six months, introducing new tools or adding enhanced functions in each release. These incremental builds decrease the amount of time that users need to learn new functionalities. Nevertheless, training is a critical element of each new release. The Center ensures that the trainers work with system developers to create high-quality training materials. Training is designed to help air traffic managers quickly understand how they can best use ETMS to increase efficiency and reduce workload.

For the ETMS 8.2 release, the Volpe Center's Traffic Flow Management Division was responsible for system integration, development of key components, and deployment of the Airspace Flow Program functionality, and the Aviation Infrastructure Division developed user training to educate FAA users on the new tool

Deployment of ETMS Version 8.3 is expected in October 2006. Its signature component will replace the manual compression process for Ground Delay Programs, automatically adjusting ground delay timeframes — a process called Adaptive Compression—according to changes in factors such as weather and traffic levels.

On a single severe weather day, hundreds of flights can be delayed, diverted, or canceled, affecting thousands of passengers and resulting in millions of dollars in operating losses for NAS users and lost time for passengers. There are as many as 40 severe weather days each year. A recent analysis by MITRE estimated that using the Airspace Flow Program for 19 days in the summer of 2006 resulted in an estimated savings to the users of $3.6 million each day. Over 10 years, the program is expected to save airlines and travelers a combined total of over $900 million. (© iStockphoto)

ETMS and the Future

The Volpe Center's long-term involvement with Traffic Flow Management has included system integration, development, deployment, operations, and training, a synergy that has benefited the evolution of the system. With the maturity of the ETMS, system deployment and operation may be effectively moved to an FAA facility. Working with industry and with the FAA, the Volpe Center will continue to take a lead role that combines research and systems engineering and includes assessing emerging ideas and technologies that could benefit the national traffic management system and the overall NAS.

ETMS Supports DOT's Strategic Goals

An increased awareness of the effect of congestion on the nation's economy is reflected by two recent actions taken by the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT). In May 2006, the DOT announced the National Strategy to Reduce Congestion on America's Transportation Network—a national congestion relief initiative. For the first time congestion reduction is also called out as a strategic goal in the U.S. DOT Draft Strategic Plan for Fiscal Years 2006-2011.

Aviation delays caused by air traffic congestion are specifically cited in the plan; it is estimated that aviation delays cost Americans $9.4 billion annually. The plan calls for ways to meet new and growing demands for air transportation services through 2025 and beyond and for designing and deploying the Next Generation Air Transportation System—a modernized aviation system with greater capacity and less congestion. Traffic Flow Management (TFM) is considered to be a central component of the system.

The Volpe Center is committed to supporting U.S. DOT in addressing this issue; the TFM team provides leadership in this area, and the evolving functionality of ETMS offers a dynamic tool for meeting this requirement.