Reduced Congestion — New Enhanced Traffic Management System release helps reduce airport ground delay

As the number of air passengers increases every year, reducing aviation congestion while meeting projected demands on the national airspace system is critical. Congestion is now being approached in a systematic way that encompasses the entire airspace. The Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS)—a Volpe Centerdeveloped system—supports the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) efforts to improve the reliability and predictability of air travel and thus increase air system capacity. ETMS integrates real-time flight and weather data from multiple sources, presenting information graphically in a highly adaptable format and enabling more efficient, predictable, and equitable management of air traffic in congested airspace.

AIRPORT CONGESTION: As demand for air transport increases, more passengers are delayed. The Volpe Center is supporting FAAs efforts to reduce airport ground delay. (iStockphoto.com)

ETMS Version 8.3 was deployed with new functionality that will help to reduce airport ground delays and provide new capabilities to air traffic managers. During normal operations, the early and late arrivals of aircraft at airports is balanced. But if there are significantly more late arrivals than early arrivals, this may mean that available arrival slots are unused. A key component of this release is the introduction of a process called adaptive compression, which enables traffic flow managers to make maximum use of available capacity.

Adaptive Compression is particularly important during lengthy Ground Delay Programs (GDPs), such as during winter operations at Chicago's O'Hare airport in which GDPs frequently run 10 to 12 consecutive hours during a day. Delays at O'Hare create ripple effects throughout the entire U.S. air traffic system. Over the course of a lengthy GDP, airspace users adjust their demand through substitutions, cancellations, and revisions. Open slots develop over time, and the slots can go unused (e.g., unused capacity) unless the list of arrival flights is compressed. Adaptive Compression is an automated process designed to use all available slots, thus maximizing capacity utilization. This ETMS release also includes a new user Preference Set function. Preference Sets are a productivity tool for traffic managers designed to increase efficiency by reducing the time it takes a traffic manager to set up the Traffic Situation Display on their computer at the start of each shift. This enhancement can reduce the time needed to set up a workstation at the beginning of a shift, from perhaps 15 minutes to about 2 minutes. This release was deployed to over 80 FAA sites in the U.S. as well as to the following international sites: Great Britain, Eurocontrol, Mexico, Canada, Central America, and Chile.