Jan 2012.

How Is Airspace Traffic going to be in the future? What is NextGen?

Amazing Video of current air traffic on a typical or atypical day best illustrate why NextGen will be so helpful. Managing air traffic is an extremely complex process. NextGen’s new technologies and ways of doing things will help keep the U.S. air transportation system in smooth working order.

(Video credit: NASA/Smithsonian Air and Space Museum)
The United States is undertaking the largest transformation of air traffic control ever attempted. Known as the Next Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, it is a multi-billion-dollar technology modernization effort that will make air travel safer, more flexible and more efficient. As the system gets better, its capacity will grow and the demand for different types of air transportation – even unmanned aircraft – will increase.

NASA is one of several U.S. government agencies that play a crucial role in helping to plan, develop and implement NextGen. NASA’s role is research and development of new ideas and technologies that will make NextGen a reality. We’re working on software that reduces airport runway and surface congestion, new landing techniques that save fuel and time, computer models that predict more accurately the influence of weather on flight paths, and air traffic control solutions that allow more takeoffs and landings in the same amount of time.

Because NextGen is not just about air traffic management, we’re also working on the tools and scientific knowledge needed to advance engine and airframe technology for today’s aircraft, and develop unconventional new vehicles that will fly faster, cleaner and quieter, and use less fuel.

We asked NASA researchers to answer some questions about NextGen and the aircraft that will make the system complete.

Below, Leighton Quon, project manager of NextGen Systems Analysis, Integration, and Evaluation at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., answers eight questions about what NASA is doing to help improve air transportation for all of us in the future.

Read full article  http://www.nasa.gov/topics/aeronautics/features/8q_nextgen.html