FUTUREFLIGHT REVISITED
Update of a NASA/FAA initiative to bring technology to planning
By John F. Infanger, Editorial Director
September 2001
The FutureFlight Central facility is the
airport from a control tower’s perspective, able to take what is
the view of the airport and its operations today and project onto its
screens what can be tomorrow. It can also be used to make what is today
safer.
It is housed in a government-as-usual building
— like much of NASA, one cannot tell the level of sophistication
that lies within — at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field,
in the heart of the Silicon Valley.
The first floor looks much like a flight
training facility, with quaint computer stations and a small class area.
Upstairs is the tower, which when running can simulate a lifelike reproduction
of any airfield’s activity, whether actual or proposed. It is here
that one first gets the sense of the scope of this creation.
What an Airport Can Expect
FutureFlight
Central operations manager Nancy Dorighi outlines what it takes
to work with the facility to study an individual airport ...
"We’ve
done projects for as low as $50,000 and as high as $400,000,"
she says. "It just depends on whether we’re building the
airport model from the ground up, whether we’re doing a lot
of days of simulation. Once the model’s built, to come back
and repeat or maybe do a different test using the same 3-D database
and scenarios would be very minimal. You’ve already done the
up front work"
Dorighi estimates that the modeling
for the simulation accounts for half the overall project cost.
An airport provides a CAD model, which
gives the layout of the airport, accurate dimensions for buildings
and runways, etc., says Dorighi. "We would also go to the airport
and take high resolution photographs, and would probably ask the
airport to provide us with aerial photography, if they had it,"
she says.
"We have a contract in place
for vendors to provide us with the 3-D database. We assemble all
these materials and have the vendor build us a 3-D model. That takes
about 2 months."
Airports provide arrival/departure
and ground activity, and then work with NASA at coordinating pilots
and controllers for the actual simulation. The airport then defines
the scope of the project.
But there is more to it. The potential
for success in FutureFlight Central is the human interaction that interfaces
with the technology. There are live pilots; live controllers inputting
and reacting as the environment around them unfolds. All of that is then
collected and recorded. It is not technology for its own sake, says Nancy
Dorighi, the facility’s manager of operations.
"We call it a national resource,"
says Dorighi. "We’re still trying to convince people of the
value of doing human interactive simulation.
"It’s a way to really have more
than a realistic assessment of some change that you’re considering,
because now you’re including the human and all the voice communication
and workload issues that are part of anything an airport might be considering.
But it’s also a way to get the buy-in of the end-users, the people
that will be impacted by the decisions that are being made.
"I think we’re in the formative
years; we’re still trying to get the word out and educate the public.
This is the next level of simulation. The industry has never had anything
like this before. It’s a new tech for them to use. It was built with
taxpayer funds; it’s available. It’s really something that individual
airports and airlines couldn’t afford to have put together themselves."
CURRENT PROJECTS
Two of the major projects underway for 2001
at FutureFlight Central are addressing two of the major issues in the
industry today: runway incursions and the impact of new runways and configurations
on capacity.
Los Angeles World Airports is working with
NASA officials at how different procedures and/or a new taxiway can positively
impact runway incursions at LA International Airport (LAX). At San Francisco
Internation-al Airport (SFO), the challenge is runway configurations and
a potential new runway that would run into South Bay. SFO is looking for
FutureFlight Central to provide realistic data on how different alternatives
will affect capacity and safety.
Explains Dorighi, "San Francisco Airport
was a visualization study only. It was really phase one of what they intend
to do in the long run. Their plan to expand the airport is what prompted
it.
"They gave us the design for one of
the configurations of the new runway in the bay; it’s a relocated
runway. We modeled that in our 3-D environment, and worked out arrivals
and departures that would look realistic, and then let their controllers
and people from their development office and the local FAA come and view
the airport from five candidate tower locations.
"The thinking is they may have to build
a new tower to manage the traffic with the new runway configuration. We
showed it to them in different weather conditions: the typical San Francisco
fog; day and dusk; the east flow and the west flow. We went through a
real systematic matrix of conditions and tower locations to help them
narrow down their decisionmaking."
At LAX, NASA has been working on phases
one and two of its project to study runway incursions. As with any study,
the initial work involves collecting the data, photography, and resources
(including pilots and controllers) needed to implement the next step —
introducing alternatives.
FutureFlight Central’s Boris Rabin,
directing the LAX project, has worked on NASA simulations for missions
to the moon and Mars. He has been involved with the facility since its
concept stage six years ago.
Explains Rabin, "Phase one was quite
successful. Our main objective was to achieve a level of relief from the
controllers workload, and we were able to do that.
"The main challenge in that was to
produce the heaviest traffic during the peak arrival and departure times.
We are trying to reproduce the same traffic, and that way provide the
controllers a similar environment as the real tower situation.
"Based on their knowledge of the situation,
they came up with some ideas on how they can change operations at the
airport to reduce the incursion rate.
"We’re talking about 160 operations
per hour. In order to simulate this traffic realistically, we had to have
pilots proficient enough with the software, who know communications that
pilots and controllers would know, who know the LAX layout. So, it took
us about a month and a half to train pilots to be able to handle that.
"In the end, I think we were able to
give controllers, with the help of the pilots, that level of reality in
this environment so that they could tell it was as close to real as possible."
According to Dorighi, NASA has begun another
project that will be directed at surface management at airports. "NASA
has a contract which they’ve issued to a team of vendors headed by
Raytheon to develop a surface management system," she says. "It
will involve automation tools and probably some new technologies that
will enable better management and control of movement on the surface of
the airport. It’s going to be tested at DFW; it’s just a prototype.
It will be tested in our facility, FutureFlight Central, first to work
out the display concepts and interface issues."
