Coordinated Contingency Planning in the Face of Uncertainty in the National Aviation System

One of the major challenges for strategic planning in aviation concerns uncertainty about weather and traffic constraints, as traffic managers often have to disseminate reroute advisories 2 hours before an expected constraint impacts an airport, and dispatchers file flight plans 60-75 minutes before a flight’s departure. When the predictions used to for these plans are wrong, significant inefficiencies (unused airspace and runway capacity from a traffic manager’s perspective and delayed flights from a dispatcher’s perspective) often result. To make operations more adaptive, new procedures have been developed. These procedures involve using predefined Coded Departure Routes, and are now being extended to include the dissemination of strategic plans that explicitly deal with uncertainty. Through this process, the decision about what departure route to actually use for a flight can be delayed until it is ready to depart, avoiding the need to make an early (and potentially poor) commitment to a departure route that may be unavailable at the time the flight taxis out for departure, while still keeping the dispatcher in the loop