A predictive system and method for aircraft load balancing and handoff management leverages the aircraft flight plan as well as channel occupancy and loading information. Several novel techniques are applied to the load balancing and handoff management problem: Use of aircraft position and flight plan information to geographically and temporally predict the appropriate ground stations that the aircraft should connect to for handoff, and monitoring the load of ground stations and using the ground-requested, aircraft initiated handoff procedure to influence the aircraft to connect to lightly loaded ground stations.
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