GSP Grants Watch

Funding Source: NASA Headquarters
Funding Type: Discretionary, Cooperative Agreement
Total Available: N/A
Award Ceiling: N/A
Deadline: 12.01.09
Eligibility: Unrestricted

Description:

The NextGen-Airportal Project works in close collaboration with the NextGen- Airspace Project to conduct airspace and Airportal foundational research and discipline-based technology development for the nation. The Project focuses NASA’s technical expertise and world-class facilities to enable the highest possible efficiency in the use of gates, taxiways, runways, metroplex airspace, and other Airportal resources. In pursuit of that goal, the project is researching, developing, demonstrating, and validating operational concepts, proof-of-concept systems, algorithms, technologies, tools, and operational procedures designed to maximize capacity and throughput in the Airportal environment while enabling associated elements of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) as defined by the Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO). Project performance objectives seek to use 4-D trajectories (aircraft path from “block-to-block,” including the path along the ground) to plan and execute system-wide operations; integrate 4-D trajectory operations with safe, optimized surface and terminal area traffic operations (particularly those associated with wake hazard prediction and avoidance); balance environmental issues in, and around, airports; match surface and airside capacities with arrival and departure air traffic flow; and assess local benefits of Airportal transformation by modeling changes to the current airport configuration. In support of these objectives, research activities will focus on:

• Optimization of surface traffic
• Dynamic airport configuration management
• Advanced technologies to detect and avoid wake vortex hazards
• New procedures for performing safe, closely spaced and converging approaches at closer distances than are currently allowed
• Modeling, simulation, and experimental validation focused on efficient operations of single and multiple regional airports