Intentionally Left Blank Executive Summary

This report presents a first-order analysis of blind conflicts expected to affect the NAS system in the near future under two Free Flight operational concepts: RVSM and Cruise Climb. The study focused on the development and use of two computer models (AOM and AEM) to respectively predict traffic flows across well defined volumes of airspace, and the number of potential blind conflicts if all flight plans are executed without controller or pilot intervention. The models developed have been coded in Matlab, a general engineering language, facilitating their execution on any computer platform (PCs, PowerPC Macs, and UNIX workstations) without modifications. While this study provides a first-order approximation of the level of conflict exposure in a particular center or sector it does not provide a measure of collision risk in the true sense. Further investigation of the end-game ATC controller and pilot dynamics (including aircraft navigational accuracy) is need-ed to truly quantify collision risk. Some insightful computational test are conducted to understand traffic pattern variations and blind con-flicts in four enroute control centers in CONUS. The time and spatial characteristics of these conflicts were studied using the tools developed to provide a view into the type of conflict encounters expected in future NAS operations. The hope is that these tools would be further refined to assess collision ris