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Active TRL 1 (started at 1, targeting 5)
The Center for Air Transportation Resilience (CATRes) is a $6 million, three-year effort to improve the resilience of the US National Airspace System (NAS) in order to reduce the disruptive impact of major storms, facility outages, and other shocks. CATRes will proactively stress test and harden the NAS. Stress testing refers to proactively probing for vulnerabilities that could lead to widespread disruption. The vulnerabilities, once uncovered, should then be removed or mitigated–process we describe as hardening. Just as airline safety is produced through the combined efforts of airlines and government overseers to identify and mitigate risks before they lead to catastrophic accidents, CATRes seeks to improve NAS resilience through systematic stress testing and hardening. Technologies under development include a suite of models to predict NAS behavior and performance under a set of disruptions scenarios, decision support tools to plan and execute countermeasures to reduce disruption severity, and mechanisms to enable multiple aviation stakeholders to collaborate in order to anticipate, mitigate, and respond to future disruptions.
These technologies will benefit aviation stakeholders and air travelers by reducing the cost, inconvenience, and stress resulting from major disruptions of the NAS. To illustrate this benefit, 14% of flight cancellations occur on the 1.7% of the days in the NAS that have major disruptions, and days with such large numbers of cancellations have outsized impacts on passenger travel experiences. By focusing on improving operations on such days, CATRes will make air travel "horror stories" much less common.
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