Airspace Operations Lab @ NASA Ames

Integration of new flight operations, such as urban air mobility vehicles and commercial space flights, into the National Airspace System (NAS) will require accommodation of new vehicles with different performance and mission profiles into an established traditional commercial and general aviation aircraft operational framework. For example, in this increasingly diverse future air traffic operations, the interaction and integration of on-demand operations with traditional, largely scheduled operations will lead them to share existing commercial airspace with increased requirements on data exchange and control schemes to ensure adequate safety margins. In this new paradigm, the traditional operations will need to transform from current vector-based operation to a more integrated trajectory based operation (TBO) in which the aircraft's trajectory intents are more strategically planned, precisely tracked, and collaboratively coordinated. Over the years, NASA has been developing, demonstrating and transferring air traffic management concepts to the FAA to support surface, departure and arrival metering, as well as dynamic reroutes for weather avoidance. This paper describes a framework for combining and advancing those NASA efforts to improve arrival and departure demand management by integrating select NASA TBO capabilities with the Traffic Flow Management System (TFMS), Time-Based Flow Management (TBFM), and the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) tools to enable TBO across the NAS. The overall concept incorporates operator priorities and preferences in a service-oriented approach to managing complex, high demand airports.