The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) projects significant growth in the use of the national airspace (NAS) for commercial, military, and private operations including the integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS). To accommodate this growth, the FAA is designing next generation air traffic management (ATM) systems that utilize trajectory based operations (TBO) to provide a safe, flexible, and efficient airspace for the projected demand. Models of TBO concepts are key to the effort because models are used at design time to identify new concepts and automation that actually have real potential to improve NAS utilization before such concepts are fielded in costly full scale human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation studies; thus, design time tools to support the development, validation, and analysis of complex ATM models is ever important. This paper discusses one such tool that visualizes simulation output from TBO models. Unlike existing visualizations, this one conveys critical TBO information such as sequences of arriving airplanes, the schedules of the arrivals, a time-line that compares the estimated time of arrivals with the scheduled times, certain controller interactions, flight movement with in-trail separations, and the tracking of departure queues. The tool has been applied to a TBO concept model in the New York metroplex aiding in the development of the model by not only revealing several bugs but in validating the expected behavior of the TBO concept because it is easier for subject matter experts to visually assess model behavior in real-time than to review its performance from logs and tables. As such, the tool has proven indispensable for subject area experts in understanding such a complex ATM model with its implications, and for modeling experts in developing and validating the model of the concept.
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