Fundamental Aeronautics and NextGen
It's more than just the airplane, silly!

Depending on whose predictions you believe, by 2025, the number of commercial aircraft operations in the US will grow by a factor of 2 to 3 when compared to 2004 levels. Let's put that growth in perspective: compared with today's levels, our current air transportation system was handling a third fewer operations in 1977.* That was roughly 30 years ago! Therefore, the current rate of growth could be roughly double that seen by the previous generation. The system itself was not conceived to handle the traffic levels of today, let alone the tremendous growth that is forecast for the future. As a result, it is now experiencing great stress. Significant improvements have been made over the years to get to where we are while maintaining, arguably, the highest standards of safety of any transportation method in the world. However, it is widely recognized that the current air transportation system will not be sufficient to meet the projected traffic demands. What will we need to do in the future to ensure that aviation continues to be a driver for the national economy? Build better and more advanced aircraft? Create a better air traffic management (ATM) system?

The answer is likely to be found in the Next Generation Air Transportation System—NextGen—a system that will use satellites and advanced computer technology and communications similar to the internet to enable a future system of air transportation that is safe, dependable, and secure, and that is able to accommodate the predicted levels of demand. Efforts to define NextGen are being led by the Joint Program Development Office (JPDO) in collaboration with a number of government agencies including the Department of Transportation, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Aeronautics & Space Administration (NASA), the Department of Defense, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

As NextGen evolves to handle the projected growth in the national air transportation system, the Fundamental Aeronautics Program is helping to answer two major questions that the system will face: (1) How will we continue to reduce the environmental impact of aviation (in terms of noise, emissions, and local air quality) despite its very significant growth? and, (2) What kinds of advanced vehicles will be required to satisfy the forecasted demand and levels of environmental compliance? As the number of flight operations at many of the largest airports in the nation continues to increase, environmental concerns over noise and emissions will limit the capacity of those airports, and therefore, of the entire system. By 2025, the demand for air transportation will be satisfied by a variety of different classes of aircraft. The Fundamental Aeronautics Program is developing ideas, technologies, and tools that will one day enable the development of highly efficient and environmentally friendly aircraft (including subsonic vehicles; supersonic aircraft; and vehicles with the ability to take-off and land on short runways, yet cruise at transonic speeds efficiently) and rotorcraft to meet the performance and environmental requirements that will be demanded by the public. The video, Today's Research ... Tomorrow's Flight details the work of the Fundamental Aeronautics Program.

The natural approach in order to achieve the goals of NextGen is to develop the future ATM procedures and the aircraft that will fly in the future airspace independently. This is essentially what has been done in the past, and all indications are that, without appropriate action, this is what will be done in the future. While one could argue that this design process worked well in the past, it will be impossible to extract the required levels of performance (capacity, environment, fuel efficiency, safety) by designing these components in isolation. If future ATM procedures are not informed by the diversity and the performance characteristics of the vehicles that could possibly be flying in 2025 and beyond, the ATM system will effectively hinder the introduction of advanced aircraft and technologies designed to satisfy the capacity, environmental impact, and efficiency demands. Conversely, if new aircraft and aircraft technologies are developed without taking into account the air transportation system they will be flying in, we would be fooling ourselves if we believed that unprecedented levels of performance and environmental impact could be achieved when, in reality, such aircraft would never be allowed to fly in the system. And all of this needs to be done while maintaining the highest standards of safety, even if 150,000 flights need to be handled every day (compared with roughly 50,000 flights per day today). It is clear that a new paradigm is required.

For this reason, future research efforts in NASA's Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) and within its three research programs (the Fundamental Aeronautics, Airspace Systems, and Aviation Safety programs) must be integrated. We are witnessing the first steps towards accomplishing this necessary integration. Earlier in the year, the Airspace Systems Program released an NRA solicitation for the “Integration of Advanced Concepts and Vehicles into the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen)” that has strong participation from the Fundamental Aeronautics and Aviation Safety programs. The Fundamental Aeronautics Program will soon be releasing a solicitation for “Advanced Concept Studies for Subsonic and Supersonic Commercial Transports Entering Service in the 2030-35 Period” that will be looking at future aircraft concepts, as informed by the demands and the likely organization of NextGen. In addition, a number of recent NRA awards have targeted the kind of integration between the three programs that is being discussed here. These are only a few examples of the level of interaction that NASA will be promoting in its future research efforts, and the Fundamental Aeronautics Program will be participating in many of these initiatives.

By my reckoning, the simple lesson for the Fundamental Aeronautics Program is: “It's more than just the airplane, silly!” We must struggle to ensure that all of our technology investments in areas related to NextGen are such that they have a realistic chance to eventually fly in NextGen. This means that we must set up our research efforts in such a way that they are informed by new ATM procedures. Furthermore, we must strive to ensure that NextGen is informed of the potential for advanced new capabilities so that those may be taken into account in the design of new ATM procedures. The various portions of the vehicle-ATM-safety ecosystem depend strongly on each other and cannot be understood in isolation.

Sincerely,

Juan J. Alonso
Director, Fundamental Aeronautics Program Office
Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate

*Based on historical values of scheduled revenue passenger enplanements from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.