Principles of Airspace Tube Design forDynamic Airspace Configuration

摘要

Today's airspace structure and operational restrictions are rigidly defined, with heavy linkage to navigational aids and airspace sectors that have evolved over time and usage. The Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) will require greater flexibility in the configuration and management of airspace, especially in reaction to changing demand patterns and user needs. Dynamic Airspace Configuration (DAC) research is exploring novel airspace structures to accommodate future demand growth. A potential category of airspace structures is tubes or corridors in the sky. We develop and enhance the current understanding of tube design options and their tradeoffs by creating a comprehensive list of design issues and some potential alternatives. We perform limited analysis to gain insight into some of these issues and principles and to make an early estimate of capacity-enhancing effects of tubes for the airspace. We leverage the issues and our analytic findings to propose a sequence of future experiments ranging from those we consider most critical to least critical for operational feasibility.