Wing and his team already have tested the TASAR software twice aboard a Piaggio P180 Avanti aircraft, a high-performance technology test bed owned and operated by Advanced Aerospace Solutions, LLC of Raleigh, North Carolina.
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The software comes on a tablet computer that is already in-use for charts and flight calculations by airlines pilots. The space agency that is better known for its extraterrestrial adventures than its earthly innovations announced the development of the Traffic Aware Planner (TAP) application, which NASA claims will “help air carriers save time and reduce fuel consumption and carbon emissions”. The product is stacked onto the electronic flight sack (EFB), which is a paperless path for flight groups to oversee in-flight information. Equipped with this knowledge, pilots can make more informed “traffic aware strategic aircrew requests” (TASARs), or route change requests. Other beneficial cabilities of TAP include its ability to retrieve important information that can affect the flight efficiency like instanteneous weather conditions and wind forecast. The shortcut saved the crew four minutes of flight time.
The software also performed successfully during flight tests in the north-east corridor and recently, it completed a second round of flight tests to ensure readiness for operational use by partner airlines. But commercial airlines don’t have the luxury that cars have in terms of sudden about-turns or lane-changes – flight-route changes have to be approved by air traffic control. Set to be used by Virgin America and Alaska Airlines over the next three years, TAP also connects to the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) which scans nearby air traffic to assure that there are no conflicts of newly proposed flight paths.
“The system is meant to help pilots make better route requests that air traffic controllers can more often approve”, David Wing, the TASAR project lead, said. “This should help pilots and controllers work more effectively together and reduce workload on both sides from un-approvable requests”.
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Meanwhile, Tom Kemp, VP of operations for Alaska Airlines, expressed his amazement over TAP’s ability to provide comprehensive real-time data that are very vital in each flight.
