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Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New YorkCity



 
 
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  #1  
Old March 31st, 2009, 12:35 AM posted to rec.travel.air
Ablang
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Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New YorkCity

Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York
City
By Andrew Blum Email 02.23.09

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretran...urrentPage=all

Inbound JFK. The turns start while you're still in the clouds. Engines
howling, flaps down, the plane lurches and dives, jerky as a taxi in
Midtown. Seatback upright and tray table locked, you're oblivious to
the crowded flight paths around you. But the air above New York City
is mapped: a dense and nuanced geography nearly as complicated as the
city below.

More than 2 million flights pass over the city every year, most
traveling to and from the metropolitan area's three busiest airports:
John F. Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia. And all that traffic squeezes
through a network of aerial routes first laid out for the mail planes
of the 1920s. Aircraft are tracked by antiquated, ground-based radar
and guided by verbal instructions issued over simplex radios,
technology that predates the pocket calculator. The system is
extremely safe—no commercial flight has been in a midair collision
over the US in 22 years—but, because the Federal Aviation
Administration treats each plane as if it were a 2,000-foot-tall, 6-
by 6-mile block lumbering through the troposphere, New York is running
out of air.

This is a nightmare for New York travelers; delays affect about a
third of the area's flights. The problem also ripples out to create a
bigger logjam: Because so many aircraft pass through New York's
airspace, three-quarters of all holdups nationwide can be traced back
to that tangled swath of East Coast sky.


Six years ago, Congress green-lit a plan to solve this problem. The
Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act calls for a new system, dubbed
NextGen, that uses GPS to create a sort of real-time social network in
the skies. In theory, it should give pilots the data they need to
route themselves—minus the huge safety cushions.

But NextGen needs some serious hardwa roughly $300,000 in new
avionics equipment for every cockpit. That's a lot of peanuts for the
struggling airlines. Add to the tab nearly 800 new federally funded
ground stations to relay each plane's location and trajectory to every
other plane in the sky and—by the time NextGen finally launches in 2025
—the price tag could reach $42 billion.
Jetliner Photos: Jeffrey Milstein

In the meantime, the New York-area skies have seen a huge traffic bump
over the past two decades—including a 48 percent increase between 1994
and 2004. So the FAA has set out to coax new efficiency from old
technology.

To help reorganize this airspace, the FAA called on Mitre, a Beltway
R&D firm that works exclusively for the government. Mitre's scientists
and mathematicians, in cooperation with some of the region's air
traffic controllers, are completely rethinking the flow of aircraft in
and out of New York City. Current flight patterns evolved like a
rabbit warren, with additions tacked on to an existing architecture.
As airports grew busier and airplanes started flying higher and
faster, that architecture became increasingly inefficient. The plan,
the unfortunately named New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan
Area Airspace Redesign, aims to bring order to the air.

Think of it as a redrawn map of the roadways in the sky. While planes
used to chug in and out of the city on a few packed roads, the
redesign spreads out the aircraft by adding new arrival posts (exit
ramps), departure gates (on-ramps), and takeoff headings (streets
leading up to the intercity highways). But the biggest move will be
making the space for all these additions. Mitre's proposal is to
extend the boundaries of this airborne city into a 31,180-square-mile
area that stretches from Philadelphia to Albany to Montauk.

The FAA started implementing the first part of the plan—the new
takeoff headings—in December 2007 and should have the full strategy in
place by 2012. By then the agencies hope to have reduced delays in New
York by an average of three minutes per flight. And in a system as
interconnected as the US air traffic network, those few minutes could
quickly cascade into hours.
Unclogging the Skies


A new FAA plan—the New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Area
Airspace Redesign—aims to streamline the air traffic over New York.
Here are two highlights.

Adding Lanes
Flights heading west out of New York have to squeeze onto two airborne
highways over New Jersey before they merge with air traffic from the
rest of the country. The redesign adds more lanes, allowing more
planes to take off per hour.


Expanding Control
The New York regional air traffic control center is the busiest in the
world. The redesign integrates its authority with other regional
centers so controllers can direct planes that are farther away,
clearing the high-altitude flight paths for through-traffic.


The nine runways at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark—which together
would form the nation's busiest airport—are roughly parallel to one
another to accommodate prevailing wind conditions. The result is way
too many planes flying in the same general direction. The controllers
can override FAA safety regs when the skies are clear and calm,
inching planes closer together and relying on the pilots' sharp eyes
to avoid catastrophe. But when it rains and the pilots can't see each
other, the multi-mile buffers return, the airspace overflows, and the
line of traffic clogs the skies clear back to LAX. The redesign does
not change the official safety separations—that's for NextGen—but it
does try to use every last wisp of sky.

The first plan Mitre tested erased the current flight paths and placed
the airports in an idealized box, where arrivals came in at the
corners and departures went out over the sides. It didn't work. All
the traffic clustered around one corner and jammed up.

So the team tried routing aircraft over the Atlantic. That didn't work
either: Flight times were longer, the patterns were more complex, and
the number of planes the airspace could accommodate decreased. "We
don't have the luxury of saying all the arrivals are going down the
Long Island Sound and all the departures are going out over the
ocean," says Steve Kelley, the former New York controller overseeing
the redesign for the FAA. "We'd handle about two airplanes an hour."

These test patterns, which worked poorly enough in ideal conditions,
really fell apart when the simulators cranked up the intensity, adding
bogeymen like inclement weather (of which the real New York has
plenty). The team needed to factor in a controller's prerogative to
make adjustments on the fly. The problem was a lot more complicated
than just drawing new lines in the air. So, naturally, Mitre brought
in its nuclear physicist.

Joe Hoffman came to Mitre in 1990 to work on command-and-control
systems (what about them, precisely, he declines to say). When
"nuclear war stopped being so popular," Hoffman says, he transferred
to the wing of the building where the necessary security clearance
isn't quite so high. As the redesign's chief strategic thinker, his
first step was to figure out how to mathematically express the way
planes move through New York's airspace. It wasn't so difficult: He'd
been working with similar equations for years.

Airplanes in flight mimic (to a point) electrons whizzing around in
their subatomic orbits. "The mathematics relate," he says. While a
moving object in the terrestrial world can be tracked with four
variables—latitude, longitude, speed, and time—an airplane soaring
along a flight path adds a fifth—altitude. In Hoffman's sky—and in the
math he uses to describe it—not all of these variables are equal; each
one has to be weighted differently.

His calculations showed that some variables could be changed with
fewer negative consequences than others. Planes have to keep a certain
distance from one another, so latitude and longitude are rigid. Time,
not surprisingly, is inelastic. The easiest variables to change are
speed and altitude, but if you slow a plane down on the wrong road,
you cause a traffic jam. The system needed more roads. Instead of
lining up birds one behind another along the same trajectories, he
needed to spread them out, maximizing the airspace.

To do this, Mitre recommended integrating the jurisdiction of the New
York Tracon with other regional control centers—expanding the low-
altitude zone in which all arriving and departing aircraft fly. The
biggest backups in the current system happen when a flight transitions
from the high-speed, long-distance "en route" highways to the slower,
local "terminal" roads—the ones that the Tracon controls. The redesign
creates a kind of airborne suburbia, paving the skies far out into
what was the countryside. The idea is that the controllers can get
planes off the intercity highways sooner, keeping them clear for
through-traffic.

Ultimately, they'll be able to get more planes on the ground per hour
by interlacing their runway approaches. And more widely spread
patterns for outbound flights will prevent bottlenecks and allow more
planes to take off every hour.

The aim of each of these tweaks is to shave off a few seconds here and
there to ultimately hit that three-minute goal. Mitre sees it as a
classic systems engineering scenario: Little changes snowball into big
effects. But the question is, can the controllers handle the extra
territory and fuller screens? Mitre put them in a giant simulation
facility to find out.
Readier for Takeoff

By fanning takeoff headings across the sky, departure rates at Newark
airport have increased by as much as 16 percent during peak hours.

Mitre headquarters in McLean, Virginia, isn't far from the CIA. It
shares a parking lot with Northrop Grumman and an architectural
sensibility with Dunder Mifflin. The exterior is tan and glass and
crenellated with cameras. The interior is a study in grays. When you
check in, the receptionist will inquire, "Is this a classified
meeting?" Nearby, a sign warns: No un-encrypted Mitre laptops beyond
this point.

Founded in 1958 as an offshoot of MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Mitre
worked on an air defense network that was a model for Arpanet, the
predecessor to the Internet. In the 1960s it figured out how to merge
the nation's airports into a connected web that would become known as
the National Airspace System. Since then, it has helped design flight
patterns above Los Angeles and Chicago. But neither of these skyscapes
was nearly as daunting as New York's.

Mitre's primary tool for testing whether its New York plan will work
is the Air Traffic Management Laboratory. A sprawling windowless
simulation facility, it has a full-size 737 cockpit, a mock airport
tower, and an army of radar screens just like in a typical control
tower. Technicians can simulate any event possible in the FAA's world—
from a routine takeoff to a crash landing. Visitors—usually angry
airline reps—watch the action piped into a conference room.

Hoffman stands inside the darkened lab. A half-dozen controllers gaze
at pizza-box-sized monitors filled with pulsing green blips, imaginary
planes flying around a fictitious New York City sky. These guys are
the real thing: golf-shirted, bug-eyed FAA vets down from the city for
a week of experiments and lonely beers in a strange town. With radio
triggers gripped firmly in their left hands, they use their rights to
punch at keypads, entering the verbal commands they've just issued to
the pilots passing through their sectors.
All Jetliner Photos: Jeffrey Milstein

But the pilots are not real cockpit jockeys. They're lab techs trained
in air traffic lingo, plugged into headsets, and sitting in front of
another bank of monitors in a nearby room. When a controller issues a
command, the "pilot" logs it into a program that looks like a
spreadsheet. The simulation responds with a corresponding blip on the
radar screen.

Today controllers are testing new flight paths above Robbinsville, New
Jersey, an area about 50 miles south of Manhattan that currently falls
under JFK's departure path and could soon see traffic from Newark and
LaGuardia. The Mitre folks speculate that they can improve the flow of
departures out of New York by sending them farther south or west
before they peel off toward flyover country. Much of the Garden
State's sky is essentially a giant merge (poor state can't catch a
break) where the westward flows from each NYC airport climb toward
cruising altitude. The challenge is to make sure each sector is safely
handling as many planes as possible. Or rather, as is humanly
possible: For all the high tech toys at Mitre, the success of the
redesign depends entirely on the processing power of the guys in the
golf shirts—their ability to mentally keep track of the additional
planes in their sectors. Mitre's redesign remains a decidedly analog
affair.

The controllers direct planes around the simulated airspace for 45
minutes. Then engineers debrief them about their experience: Did the
planes' transitions out of the Tracon feel right? Were the widened
departure gates improving the flow? Could crossing traffic flows be
properly "deconflicted," as the controllers put it? Mitre officially
thinks it was a success. Hoffman has his own method of gauging
controllers' stress levels: Check the angles their spines make with
the seats of their chairs. At 100-plus degrees—leaning back—the work
is easy; straight up, things are getting interesting; once they cross
the 90-degree threshold and begin to perch forward, the sky is roiling
chaos. Most of the controllers at the simulation never crossed the 90-
degree mark.
Current Flight Traffic for JFK International Airport
FlightView Inc Real Time Flight Tracking

Flight data for this article and map above was provided by FlightView.


Three hundred twenty-seven feet above Newark Liberty International
Airport, in the windowed cab of the control tower, Hoffman's stress-
assessment metric proves utterly useless: Louis Caggiano likes to
stand as he works the hot seat, with departing flights lined up 15-
deep on the taxiway. It's a hazy morning in July, and inbound aircraft
are hard to pick out on the horizon, appearing first on a radar screen
that hangs from an adjustable track. Each of Caggiano's outbound
flights corresponds to a paper strip in a plastic sleeve. He holds a
stack in his hand and fiddles with them as if they were poker chips.
After giving the verbal command that sends a plane lumbering down the
runway, he time-codes the flight strip with a machine that looks like
an electric stapler, then drops the card into a slot in the counter.
Bending down like a boxer ducking a punch to get a higher view of the
sky, he visually confirms that the plane is up. Then Caggiano launches
the next one in line—46 departures that hour.

It may not look like much, but this is the first piece of the redesign
in action. Controllers will start testing the new departure gates and
arrival posts over the next two years, but they've been using the
modified takeoff headings for months. All the planes leaving Newark
used to depart along fairly similar courses, but the redesign's
"dispersal" headings aim to reduce delays by fanning flights out
across the sky. According to FAA rules, planes can stack up on the
tarmac as long as they're not actually touching. But the instant
they're airborne, they must be 3 miles apart—unless they're moving
away from each other. Dispersal headings satisfy that directive and
thus increase capacity, allowing the next plane to be cleared for
takeoff right away and saving another few seconds that Mitre predicts
will add up to hours over the course of a year.

Caggiano isn't buying it. "They don't work," he says with a brevity
that suits the simplex radio plugged into his ear. In the lab, the
second plane is always ready to go when the first one leaves the
ground. But the pilots at Newark aren't robots, and they don't move as
quickly as the simulation. The airborne flights may be banking
according to the new plan, but often the next takeoff isn't even
positioned at the runway centerline yet. Even so, the FAA's analysis
shows that dispersal headings alone are increasing the number of
takeoffs by an average of two per hour. (A typical rush hour at Newark
sees 40-something departures.) And this is only the first piece of the
redesign. Patience, Hoffman says. "The controllers are working on a
scale of minutes," he says. "We're looking at a scale of years."

The project may look futile to in-the-moment controllers and plane-
spotting activists, but the FAA predicts a savings of 9.7 minutes for
planes leaving LaGuardia and 1.3 minutes for planes arriving at
Kennedy; they'll shave 7.3 and 7.1 minutes off Newark's arrivals and
departures, respectively. And if Mitre's models are right, these
efficiencies should ripple out across the system, freeing up runways
and air routes from Los Angeles to Denver and back to New York.
Whether or not you believe those minutes will really make a
difference, one thing is certain: "The airspace is the airspace," the
FAA's Kelley says. "No one's going to give us more of it. We just have
to use it better."
  #2  
Old March 31st, 2009, 02:04 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Sancho Panza[_1_]
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Posts: 552
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City


"Ablang" wrote in message
...
Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York
City
By Andrew Blum Email 02.23.09

http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretran...urrentPage=all
=========
You have to wonder why neither the article nor the study itself addresses
the fact that for virtually the entire history of air traffic control in the
New York metropolitan region the military has reserved between one-fourth
and one-third of the airspace. That is precisely why when President Bush
lifted that ban for holiday travel periods delays actually decreased to a
nominal point, at least relative to the usual situation in the region.



  #3  
Old March 31st, 2009, 02:56 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Mxsmanic
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Posts: 5,830
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City

I prefer the way it is now. Safety first.

Most flight delays come from the limited capacity of airports in terms of
maximum number of take-offs and landings per hour. The airspace design is not
the source of these delays. And the reason the capacity of airports is often
reached is that many airlines have too many flights, especially small flights
on small aircraft instead of big flights on big aircraft. And the airlines
all want all their flights to land and take off at the same times.

So it's really a problem of airports, not airspace. If NextGen were
implemented tomorrow, the number of midairs would dramatically increase. Slow
(very slow!) implementation is better. In fact, they are already going too
fast.
  #4  
Old March 31st, 2009, 10:07 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Mxsmanic
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,830
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City

Sancho Panza writes:

You have to wonder why neither the article nor the study itself addresses
the fact that for virtually the entire history of air traffic control in the
New York metropolitan region the military has reserved between one-fourth
and one-third of the airspace. That is precisely why when President Bush
lifted that ban for holiday travel periods delays actually decreased to a
nominal point, at least relative to the usual situation in the region.


Where is this reserved airspace? I don't see it on the TAC for NYC.
  #5  
Old April 1st, 2009, 01:57 AM posted to rec.travel.air
Sancho Panza[_1_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 552
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City


"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Sancho Panza writes:

You have to wonder why neither the article nor the study itself addresses
the fact that for virtually the entire history of air traffic control in
the
New York metropolitan region the military has reserved between one-fourth
and one-third of the airspace. That is precisely why when President Bush
lifted that ban for holiday travel periods delays actually decreased to a
nominal point, at least relative to the usual situation in the region.


Where is this reserved airspace? I don't see it on the TAC for NYC.


Check the space between Rockaway and Sandy Hook.


  #6  
Old April 1st, 2009, 12:58 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Mxsmanic
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,830
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City

Sancho Panza writes:

Check the space between Rockaway and Sandy Hook.


I don't see any military airspace. What are the coordinates, or the airspace
numbers/names?
  #7  
Old April 1st, 2009, 02:01 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Sancho Panza[_1_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 552
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City


"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Sancho Panza writes:

Check the space between Rockaway and Sandy Hook.


I don't see any military airspace. What are the coordinates, or the
airspace
numbers/names?


http://sua.faa.gov/sua/Welcome.do


  #8  
Old April 1st, 2009, 11:57 PM posted to rec.travel.air
Mxsmanic
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,830
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City

Sancho Panza writes:

http://sua.faa.gov/sua/Welcome.do


Okay, I looked. I don't see any SUAs. Which ones do you have in mind?
  #9  
Old April 2nd, 2009, 01:05 AM posted to rec.travel.air
Sancho Panza[_1_]
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 552
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City


"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
Sancho Panza writes:

http://sua.faa.gov/sua/Welcome.do


Okay, I looked. I don't see any SUAs. Which ones do you have in mind?


The same ones the president of the U.S. had when he lifted the restrictions
for peak holiday times like Thanksgiving. Maybe he was better able to find

Areas 106A
107A
107B
107C

than some other people.


  #10  
Old April 2nd, 2009, 01:32 AM posted to rec.travel.air
Mxsmanic
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 5,830
Default Key to Eliminating U.S. Flight Delays? Redesign the Sky Over New York City

Sancho Panza writes:

The same ones the president of the U.S. had when he lifted the restrictions
for peak holiday times like Thanksgiving. Maybe he was better able to find

Areas 106A
107A
107B
107C

than some other people.


I don't see these on the FAA's SUA list. Are they MOAs, Alert areas, Warning
areas, Restricted, or what?
 




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