The first phase of the project in February will recreate LAX operations during arrival and departure rushes under both Visual Approach and Instrument Approach conditions with all airport, airline and FAA participants in the loop, controlling aircraft. The second phase will review different ATC procedures. Some of the issues, which have been identified as potential factors in LAX runway incursions, include communications between the tower and pilot and evaluation of arrival use of the outboard vs. inboard runways. Quantitative measures of aircraft ground movements will include FutureFlight's capabilities in measuring runway occupancy time, inbound and outbound taxi times, non-movement area time, hold times and arrival and departure rates. These measures will allow the project team to assess the impact of new potentially safer ATC procedures and runway usage on ground traffic flow and airport capacity.
Human factors are a key component in runway incursions.
The goal is to understand whether taxi instructions are simplified or made more complex under the different ATC test scenarios. NASA helped us reduce the total number of technical decisions in a much shorter period of time than conventional methods would allow. NASA in collaboration with SFO and HNTB, studied five potential tower locations for SFO's new Master Plan alternatives, as viewed under both VFR and IFR conditions. Using FutureFlight as a collaborative visual evaluation environment, SFO airfield planners, FAA air traffic controllers and other airport planning experts were able to visually evaluate the best location for a new tower using FAA visibility criteria. This is part of SFO's continuing commitment to deploy the appropriate technology advances to address our rising air passenger levels as well as decrease delays.