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Next Generation Air Safety System Taking Off
A new air traffic control system could revolutionize the way U.S. aviation and security agencies communicate during emergencies.
Four aerospace and defense industry leaders, including CSC, are demonstrating a technology called Net Enabled Operations (NEO), which shows how sharing air traffic control information among several federal agencies can improve awareness and response time during potentially dangerous situations.
The joint NEO demonstration team also includes Boeing, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and government agencies. It presents the NEO prototype to various federal senior policy committees as a network-centric system that links air traffic systems of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Departments of Defense and Homeland Security more efficiently than they are linked today.
In the demonstrations, NEO tracks a commercial aircraft entering Washington, D.C., airspace in a number of scenarios. In each case, the aircraft exhibits unusual behavior and the system determines if there is a legitimate threat.
Today’s system could detect the flight’s abnormalities as well. But according to Robert Beard, director of advanced Air Traffic Management programs for CSC, it may take longer for controllers to recognize that there was a serious threat like a hijacking and alert an agency such as the Joint Air Defense Operations Center, which monitors the skies around the nation’s capitol.
"We show how automation could keep track of these events and enable better decisions faster," Beard says. "While one scenario has a suspect commercial aircraft approaching D.C. with intent on doing damage, the other was the result of normal hardware failure on board the aircraft. NEO showed the differences for the appropriate multiagency response."
While the NEO prototype on display does not provide all the operational capabilities that could be available, the team integrated existing field systems that currently don’t talk to each other, significantly improving the situational awareness of each system operator.
With NEO, air traffic and security personnel decision makers would be able to share information on ongoing events, even though each group is operating its own systems. The result is a faster, more efficient and accurate resolution of the situation, Beard says.
The inefficiencies of the current system would have necessitated the costly launch of military interceptor aircraft for either scenario. "NEO gives better lead time to prevent an unnecessary launch," Beard says.
"Interagency decision making is very difficult, and by providing this system we think we’ve improved the awareness of the situation for all parties and improved the timeline for decision making, resulting in better decisions," he adds.
CSC’s role is key
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The issues regarding
integrating multiple systems with multiple agencies with multiple security classifications are very complicated.
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The NEO demonstration team benefits from CSC’s software expertise. Specifically, CSC’s contributions are based on software developed with NASA called REACT (Rogue Evaluation and Coordination Tool), which identifies rogue aircraft and alerts security monitoring positions, a key functionality of NEO.
"After 30-plus years of being involved with the FAA, CSC’s understating of air traffic in general has certainly helped us out," Beard explains. "Additionally, we’ve brought significant insight in air space security and anomaly detection with our NASA work to support this particular effort.
"Network-centricity is a very important capability that’s being researched and expanded significantly by the DoD," says Beard. "We’re taking advantage of that effort and bringing it into the civil environment. We believe that net-centricity will be necessary to enable capabilities that must be a part of the future air transportation systems."
NEO for the future
In addition to security, the NEO system can be used to improve the nation’s air traffic management system well into the future—but not without significant challenges. While the U.S. government is debating whether or not to move forward with NEO, the issues regarding integrating multiple systems with multiple agencies with multiple security classifications are very complicated.
"The project looks into the future to find new concepts that will be helpful to move the current national airspace system forward," Beard says. "Demand is increasing and the current system cannot handle it. We’re looking for some fairly transformational changes to the system."
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