Field Evaluation of the Baseline Integrated Arrival, Departure, and Surface Capabilities at Charlotte Douglas International Airport

NASA is currently developing a suite of decision support capabilities for integrated arrival, departure, and surface (IADS) operations in a metroplex environment. The effort is being made in three phases, under NASA's Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) sub-project, through a strong partnership with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), air carriers, airport, and general aviation community. The Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities provide enhanced operational efficiency and predictability of flight operations through data exchange and integration, tactical surface metering, and automated coordination of release time of controlled flights for overhead stream insertion. The users of the IADS system include the personnel at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) air traffic control tower, American Airlines ramp tower, CLT terminal radar approach control (TRACON), and Washington Center. This paper describes the Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities and field evaluation conducted at CLT from September 2017 for a year. From the analysis of operations data, it is estimated that 538,915 kilograms of fuel savings, and 1,659 metric tons of CO2 emission reduction were achieved during the period with a total of 944 hours of engine run time reduction. The amount of CO2 savings is estimated as equivalent to planting 42,560 urban trees. The results have also shown that the surface metering had no negative impact on on-time arrival performance of both outbound and inbound flights. The technology transfer of Phase 1 Baseline IADS capabilities has been made to the FAA and aviation industry, and the development of additional capabilities for the subsequent phases is underway

A Systematic Methodology for Populating the Aircraft Thermal Management System Architecture Space

Presented at AIAA SCITECH 2021The aircraft thermal management system functions to provide suitable working conditions for pilot, crew, passengers, and the other aircraft systems. The additional weight, drag and power consumption caused by it greatly influences the performance of the aircraft. However, due to rising heat load of emerging novel aircraft concepts, traditional design approaches which rely on data and empirical equations may not apply to the future thermal management systems. Many existing literature which tried to identify the optimal thermal management system architectures only considered limited architecture space where the candidates were pre-selected in terms of experience or intuition. Therefore, viable but non-intuitive architectures may not be included in the design space. To fill this gap, this paper proposes a behavior-based backtracking methodology to systematically populate the architecture space by enumerating both intuitive and non-intuitive architectures. Thermal management requirements for traditional and novel configurations are used to generate the architectures. By comparing the generated architectures with existing ones, this paper validates that the proposed methodology is capable of generating both intuitive and non-intuitive architectures

Design Characteristics of a Terminal Departure Scheduler

terminal departure scheduler designed to work with varying degree of precision across many airports is required to operate with high levels of uncertainty, multiple disparate departure constraints and substantial volatility. This paper describes fast time simulation modeling of terminal departure traffic to assess performance of a terminal departure scheduler. A prototype terminal departure scheduler is developed and exposed to a range of air traffic constraints, departure time uncertainty and terminal transit time uncertainty. Terminal transit error and surface error are varied to assess the robustness of scheduler design to these variations. Current day manual terminal departure scheduling practices are simulated and compared against performance of a prototype terminal departure scheduler. Simulation is used to assess the tradeoffs of sequence and schedule freeze methodologies in the terminal departure environment. Sequence freeze capability demonstrates lower average delay than schedule freeze capability for expected levels of OFF time compliance in future automation. Dallas/Fort Worth TRACON simulation results indicate the possibility of a delay reduction of 35 percent and increased departure throughput of 17 percent for commonly used terminal departures constraints. The results of this study are used to inform the design of a terminal departure scheduler which will undergo evaluation at NASA’s North Texas Research station