MIT Brainiacs Developing Solution To Cut Air Traffic Delays

Some of the world's greatest academic minds have come together to try and solve one of the most confounding problems of our times: how to reduce air traffic delays at our gridlocked airports.

The solution, developed by researchers at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, is a computer tool known as the Route Availability Planning Tool, or RAPT. RAPT works on untangling delays during a storm by collecting and compiling weather data from multiple sources, crunching that information to make predictions about airport takeoff paths most likely to be clear as the storm moves through, and then displaying that information in an easy-to-read, eye catching display so that controllers are able to make more rapid decisions.

The RAPT display shows a map of the airport with lines radiating outward to indicate the various departure routes at a given airport. A grid below the map lists the different routes in rows, and uses the columns to chop each row into five minute intervals. Each block on the grid is color coded based on anticipated weather for a particular flight path. If a controller looking at the grid sees that flight path one is green at 10:45 but then turns red at 10:50, he knows he has five minutes to get some planes into the air.

RAPT is quite a departure (<-- bad pun intended) from the way air traffic control currently deals with storms. Today, a controller receives weather information from multiple sources and has to create a mental picture to determine how it will impact different flight paths. If conditions are deteriorating and there are lots of flights in
the air and on the ground, the controller, – who is only human after all – might become overwhelmed and will respond by holding all flights until the weather has improved.

A handful of delayed flights might not sound like such a huge deal, but it can be. Studies from the Lincoln Lab show that getting just two or three additional planes up into the air at a crowded airport during storms can prevent or at least reduce bad-weather delays that often fan out across the entire air traffic system. It's one reason why a flight in Denver can be delayed for hours by a storm in Baltimore.

A RAPT prototype is being tested in New York, and the Lincoln Lab team says that it's already proving itself. Delays in the New York City region have been cut by 2,300 hours, which equals $7.5 million in operational cost savings. MIT estimates that if the system is fully implemented in New York, it could save up to 8,800 hours per year, or $28 million.

Multiply that by the 20 air traffic regions in the US, and you're talking a lot of money saved. And hopefully, a lot fewer delays.

Screenshot: MIT/Lincoln Laboratory