Author: sHq_LoGiNz

Why it matters

• Air traffic is growing and evolving and needs more efficient management
• A centralized information system helps controllers manage increasingly crowded skies
• System modernization helps to safely accommodate future aircraft types

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For every aircraft traveling across the U.S. national airspace system (NAS), there’s an intricate series of handoffs among air traffic controllers and information systems spread across numerous facilities guiding it to its destination. While the NAS remains one of the world’s safest, this sector-by-sector way of overseeing air traffic is facing greater load stress, logistical complexity and data demands.

“Controllers have a very tough job,” said Doug Lieberman, Leidos vice president and chief technology officer for air traffic. “The mental processing they have to do is astounding. So, the goal is to reduce that cognitive load.”

As the NAS grows and evolves, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) seeks to unify two of its main air traffic control systems with a single Common Automation Platform to help controllers across the nation more efficiently sequence, track and keep aircraft safely separated.

One of those is the Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System (STARS), which supports controllers on arrival and departure operations at airport control towers as well as Terminal Radar Approach Control facilities. The other is the En Route Automation Modernization (ERAM) system, which helps controllers at Air Route Traffic Control Centers track high-altitude flights.

How the evolving airspace system is redefining needs

Among FAA’s other needs for the new platform are improved visibility of the airspace, seamless data sharing and continuous adaptability to integrate advanced air traffic management methodologies. A better planned, organized and agile NAS increases safety while reducing aircraft congestion, delays for travelers, fuel burn for carriers and emissions.

The airspace also needs to be ready for new entrants, including advanced air mobility (AAM) vehicles. These include electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxis and drones that will serve local and regional transport and shipping needs, in what FAA is calling a new era of aviation.

The future of the national airspace system is that control will be done from a holistic standpoint, so that we’re optimizing the entire gate-to-gate experience.

Doug Lieberman, Leidos Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Air Traffic

Leidos responds to the Common Automation Platform 

Leidos built and has maintained ERAM, which it calls the “heart” of the NAS, for more than 20 years. Building on that experience, the company has developed the Leidos Common Automation Platform, or L-CAP, designed to bring together ERAM and STARS functionality and data within a modern and common architecture.

L-CAP can also provide oceanic air traffic control. That’s currently supported by the Advanced Technologies and Oceanic Procedures (ATOP) system. Leidos developed and supports ATOP for FAA, whose controllers use it to provide services for aircraft flying in U.S.-controlled airspace over the Atlantic, Pacific and Arctic oceans.

With L-CAP among the solutions under agency consideration, Michael Hawthorne, Leidos’ FAA account manager, noted that combining the functions of ATOP along with those of ERAM and STARS “extends the benefits of common functionality and a singular data platform across substantially all of U.S.-controlled airspace.”

Going from air traffic control to management

Shared situational awareness is increasingly important as air traffic volumes grow. Unifying operational information will help control facilities across the country coordinate decisions for aircraft and reduce demand-to-capacity imbalances. Optimal traffic movements translate to less time spent in a plane either on the ground or in the air.

That’s the premise behind the “evolution away from air traffic control and toward air traffic management,” Hawthorne remarked.

“L-CAP is really enabling aviation’s future because one of its key aspects is the unified data platform,” Lieberman said.

The platform would address one of U.S. aviation’s longstanding challenges: data tied to individual systems or facilities. Breaking down those silos can clear the path for new ways to leverage enroute, terminal and tower data, like using AI-assisted traffic prediction capabilities that can improve route planning and identify potential issues faster.

“We expect to be able to do optimizations that we haven’t done before,” Lieberman noted, “because we’ll be able to feed data into AI-enabled analytical engines.”

The potential to support more capabilities

L-CAP also provides a foundation for innovation by enabling an ecosystem approach to evolve capabilities for air traffic management, according to Hawthorne and Lieberman.

The platform’s flexible architecture would enable FAA to add purpose-built capabilities from Leidos or any of the agency’s industry partners and then update or replace them more easily. It also means that FAA won’t be locked into existing paradigms of airspace control.

“L-CAP gives FAA the flexibility to define how it wants to manage air traffic,” Lieberman said. “By separating operational policies and airspace constructs from underlying technologies, the platform can evolve without requiring extensive recoding, much like a smartphone operating system is a platform upon which developers can add new applications and enhance capabilities.”

Reducing the burden on controllers

Controllers actively oversee all flights that fly through their sectors in the airspace, which could be a couple dozen at a time. They deal with enormous amounts of information while making time-critical decisions and regularly checking in with the cockpits of each aircraft.

Addressing controllers’ workloads and cognitive burden is a major FAA objective. The agency is implementing newer methodologies such as trajectory-based operations (TBO), while concepts such as management-by-exception offer potential paths toward reducing routine controller interventions.

TBO is a methodology where flights are managed according to not only latitude, longitude and altitude but also time. Time Based Flow Management (TBFM) is a specific TBO system that Leidos developed for FAA. It analyzes numerous real-time conditions including weather, airspace congestion and airport capacity to more strategically plan routes for planes starting from their departure points. TBFM is also used to meter aircraft along their flight paths, helping to ensure that there will be airspace and runways available when they arrive.

How newer management methodologies can aid future needs

TBFM is designed to help reduce the reactive flight calculations, routing and interventions controllers currently perform. It can be combined with management-by-exception to reduce “routine and repetitive communication and potential miscommunication between controllers and pilots,” Hawthorne noted, while “optimizing flight paths by not limiting them to a preconceived airspace structure.”

Lieberman said management-by-exception “turns on its head” the way controllers are handling flights.

“Going to exception-based routing, controllers would only need to interact with an aircraft when there’s a deviation,” he said. “That’s how we could move from air traffic control to air traffic management.”

That ability to evolve will become increasingly important as new entrants to the airspace introduce different operating patterns and demands. FAA has a pilot program to explore the integration of eVTOL aircraft and other types of AAM vehicles into the NAS.

“When you have eVTOLs moving people from Baltimore to Philadelphia, they could impact that regional airspace and disrupt the classic model of the way airlines work,” Lieberman noted. “We expect to see the aviation system realign.”

He and Hawthorne say that L-CAP can give FAA a flexible foundation to address today’s operational needs and evolve with future NAS requirements.

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Three things to remember

1. A unified air traffic platform can improve safety, efficiency and shared situational awareness.
2. Modern air traffic management can reduce controller workload, congestion and flight delays.
3. A flexible platform can support growing traffic, AI assistance and advanced air mobility.

More on air traffic management

Cisco

Every traveler knows the feeling: the rolling delay that creeps from 15 minutes to three hours, the missing bag, the anxious dash between terminals. Air travel is one of the most universal experiences on the planet and one of the most complex systems humans have ever built. A single storm can ripple across an entire network, affecting thousands of passengers, millions of dollars, and, in the worst cases, safety itself.

What if airports could see those disruptions coming and rehearse their response before a single passenger felt the impact?

That’s the promise behind Autonoma’s AutoVerse platform, a high-fidelity “digital twin” for airports built on Cisco technology and made possible by Cisco’s Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program. For airport and airline operators, the challenge is not simply responding faster. It is understanding how a decision will play out across the entire operation.

It’s a story that stretches from autonomous race cars to the busiest airport in the world, and it’s a vivid example of how technology can advance Cisco’s Purpose to Power an Inclusive Future for All.

From Racetrack to Runway 

Autonoma’s story doesn’t begin in an airport. It begins with autonomous vehicles: robo-taxis, semi-trucks, and eventually autonomous race cars, the last of which first connected founder and CEO Will Bryan to Cisco through a sponsored racing league.

Across all of that work, one problem kept resurfacing: technology that performed flawlessly in simulation would fall apart the moment it hit the real world. So, Will’s team built better simulation tools. Four and a half years ago, that work became Autonoma. And while it started in autonomous vehicles, the team soon realized the same challenges also existed across airports, cities, and beyond. Cisco’s CDA team helps countries accelerate their national digital agendas by working alongside government, industry, and academia to unlock the value of digitization and drive digital transformation at scale. So, airports were a natural fit. As Wayne Cuervo, CDA’s Director of Business Development puts it, “An airport is the front door to a country and its economy.” Autonoma first caught the team’s attention through Cisco’s Fast Future Innovation Awards, and what followed was a partnership that would prove itself at the extremes: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International airport, the busiest in the world, and Augusta Regional Airport, a small regional airport home to the Masters Tournament annual surge.

The Conversation

Below, Will and Wayne share how their partnership came together, how simulation is helping airport teams make more confident operational decisions, and what those improvements ultimately mean for travelers.

How did the partnership with Autonoma begin and why was it a good fit for CDA? 

Wayne: We first connected with Autonoma through the Fast Future Innovation Awards, our open call for companies using technology to solve real-world problems. They stood out for addressing a critical infrastructure challenge with a differentiated solution.

That made it a strong fit for CDA. It’s built to support bold solutions to large, nationally important problems, and airports are vital gateways to a country’s economy. Autonoma’s advanced, physics-based simulations improve airport operations, which requires the kind of secure, high-performance compute, resilient networking, and IoT integration where Cisco brings real value.

Beyond technology, CDA could bring expertise, rigor, and validation to help prove the solution and help it scale. Autonoma was a strong investment fit because it combined a high-impact use case, a novel approach, and clear alignment with Cisco’s strengths.

Tell me about the work with Delta at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport. How did this partnership come about, and what early results can you share? 

Will: For Hartsfield-Jackson, it’s obviously the busiest airport in the world. We’d won the Cisco Innovation Award to bring our technology into new airports, and Atlanta is our backyard, and also where Delta is based. We had ongoing conversations with Delta, but Cisco coming in to help get the pilot off the ground really accelerated things.

The initial focus was optimizing schedules and gate assignments. Delta is developing great technologies to make schedules more efficient, easing passenger and crew connections, and reducing taxi times so they burn less fuel. But, before overhauling their whole system, they wanted to make sure it would work. So, we built a high-fidelity digital twin to test and validate gate assignments before rolling them out. It then extended into day-to-day forecasting: what does the next four to six hours look like as weather comes in?

Autonoma has cited a 99% reduction in deployment risk. What does that look like in practice? 

Will: There are a lot of metrics we look at, but one is how many simulations you’ve tested virtually before rolling something out. For Augusta, we tested around 40 different parking strategies, each across different traffic levels.

Working with Cisco, we can run these simulations hundreds of times faster than real time, 50 in parallel on a single machine, because the Cisco hardware is resilient enough to handle it. Instead of taking a day to simulate a day, you can simulate months in a single day. That decreases deployment risk and improves your scenario coverage for what you’re prepared for.

What would you say to airports hesitant to move from traditional, reactive operations toward one that leverages AI and simulation? 

Wayne: I’d say running an airport on traditional methods, even spreadsheets, are no longer effective, and frankly no longer a responsible way to run critical services. An airport is so complex that it’s no longer feasible to manage it all manually. Every airport is challenged with reducing its environmental footprint, and you can’t do that without technology to help uncover and resolve inefficiencies. Any airport continuing with purely manual services is doing itself and its passengers a disservice.

Responsibly-deployed AI and simulation can help improve the outcomes airports care most about: digital resilience, security, efficiency, and sustainability. Technology helps uncover inefficiencies, test alternatives, and support better decisions in real time.

We see AI in the AutoVerse evolving from a tool that helps engineers test thousands of scenarios to one that can anticipate issues and support action before problems escalate.

As CEO of Autonoma, how do you balance being on the leading edge of innovation while maintaining the reliability partners and public-sector customers depend on? 

Will: It’s a difficult line to walk. Going from a prototype to delivering for an enterprise or public-sector customer requires more than innovation — it requires something robust, reliable, and validated. At Autonoma, we develop quickly, but we are diligent about building the testing, validation, and deployment infrastructure around every new capability. That rigor is calibrated to operational risk: lower-impact features can move quickly, while anything affecting critical operations undergoes deeper testing and validation.

That’s also one reason our partnership with Cisco is so valuable. Autonoma brings deep simulation expertise, operational fidelity, and the ability to iterate quickly. Cisco brings proven infrastructure, extensive experience, and the ability to support integrations across networking, compute, and hardware. Together, we can move innovation forward without compromising the reliability these environments demand.

Cisco’s Purpose is to Power an Inclusive Future for All. How does a project like this advance our Purpose, and who benefits in ways people might not expect? 

Will: What we’re proving at Autonoma is that simulations can predict outcomes beyond the foresight of any individual. It looks at follow-on effects, causality, and ripple effects across a complex ecosystem like an airport. And because airports are so complex, if we can solve it there, we can solve it in a lot of other industries. This proof of concept is transferable to smart cities and even healthcare. There’s a whole host of applications. Once we’ve proven the capability in an environment this complex and security-critical, the implications are very open to other industries that touch every aspect of human life.

What do these innovations mean for the everyday traveler, including those too often overlooked? 

Wayne: If it’s rolled out across an airport, passengers get more efficient transit times, they can predict delays and weather effects, and the journey becomes more pleasant, more predictable, safer, and more efficient. Less idle time on a plane, fewer missing bags, faster routing from plane to gate. It means a better experience for us all.

Will: Right now, a mom traveling with three kids gets a notification, flight delayed 15 minutes. Then 30. Then it just rolls and rolls, and four hours later she’s exhausted and the kids are miserable. If we could give the airline a little foresight, knowing hours ahead that it’s actually going to be a three-hour delay, it doesn’t make her day better, but it’s a lot better to know it’s three hours than to face constant rolling delays. Now she has time to feed the kids, change the baby, and go to the lounge. Turning someone’s big inconvenience into a slightly smaller one, that’s already progress, and it already makes people’s lives better.

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