28TH INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF THE AERONAUTICAL SCIENCES 1

A ground-based trajectory automation system was developed that continuously analyzes in-flight aircraft in en-route airspace to find time-and fuel-saving corrections to convective weather avoidance routes. The system could help airline dispatchers and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) traffic managers and controllers find more efficient routes around convective weather. Simple reroutes- Dynamic Weather Routes (DWR)- are automatically proposed and updated every 12 sec. Interactive automation enables users to visualize reroutes and modify them if necessary, and evaluate flying time savings, proximity to weather, sector congestion, and traffic conflicts. Analysis of 14 hours of archived traffic and weather data from one US en-route Center (Fort Worth) over five convective weather days shows an average potential savings of about 10 min per flight for 171 flights. A sector congestion analysis shows that if all DWR routes were implemented, overall sector congestion as measured by the monitor/alert parameter would decrease due to the fact that aircraft are routed off standard weather-avoidance routes. The system is ideal for air/ground data link communication, but could also be used in today’s operations.