The Small Aircraft Transportation System, or SATS, is a NASA-led initiative that seeks to revolutionize commercial air travel by increasing accessibility and mobility for the general consumer. The hallmark of SATS is on-demand, point-to-point air transportation from one of the nation's 5,400 public use airports and landing facilities. A second-order benefit is that it may help relieve congestion on the nation's highways and at our mid- to large size airport hubs. In 1999, NASA initiated a five-year, $69 million research program to study the feasibility and viability of SATS including development of the emerging technologies necessary to make SATS a reality. The five-year plan culminated in June 2005 in Danville, VA with a highly publicized flight demonstration and exposition serving as the SATS proof of concept. The "Highways-in-the-Sky" (HITS) premise inherent to SATS is arguably its biggest enabler, and it depends heavily on the idea of free flight. HITS will potentially be the first step in moving from traditional cars and other vehicles that travel on the ground to ones that will operate largely, if not entirely, in the air. The notion of "cars" that fly was first introduced by the entertainment industry in movies and television programs decades ago. But if mankind is ever to achieve that vision, we must have a start point. This research focuses not on the economic viability of SATS but rather on the degree of flight safety inherent to a program such as this. One can easily see how the introduction of a large number of autonomous vehicles operating simultaneously in an already dense region such as the National Airspace System might carry some degree of risk. This research introduces a modeling and simulation framework that will have applications to SATS at such time as the program must be evaluated from a safety of flight perspective. That will invariably include a high degree of simulation. This work also represents the first large-scale simulation focused primarily on how SATS will perform in the out-years. / Master of Science

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Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Homeland Security and Defense))--Naval Postgraduate School, December 2008. / Thesis Advisor(s): Wirtz, James J. "December 2008." Description based on title screen as viewed on January 30, 2009. Includes bibliographical references (p. 99-108). Also available in print.

Thesis (M.S.)--Ohio University, August, 1996. / Title from PDF t.p.

Thesis (Ph. D. in Engineering-Civil and Environmental)--University of California, Berkeley, 2004. / "Fall 2004." Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147). Also available online via the ITS Berkeley web site (www.its.berkeley.edu).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-147). Also available online via the Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley web site (www.its.berkeley.edu).

The modernization of the National Air Traffic Control System is on the horizon, and with it, the possible introduction of autonomous air vehicles into the national airspace. Per the FAA Aerospace Forecast (FAA, 2013), U.S. carrier passenger traffic is expected to average 2.2 percent growth per year over the next 20 years with government statistics indicating that the average domestic load factor for airlines in 2014 was approximately 84.4 percent (US Department of Transportation, 2015). Adding to that demand, the potential introduction of unmanned and autonomous air vehicles motivates reconsideration of control schemes. One of the proposed solutions (Eby, 1994) would involve a decentralized control protocol. Equipping each aircraft with the information necessary to navigate safely through integrated airspace becomes an information sharing problem: how much information about other aircraft is required for a pilot to safely fly the gamut of a heavily populated airspace and what paradigm shifts may be necessary to safely and efficiently utilize available airspace? This thesis describes the development of a tool for testing alternative traffic management systems, centralized or decentralized, in the presence of uncertainty. Applying a computational fluid dynamics-inspired approach to the problem creates a simulation tool to model both the movement of traffic within the airspace and also allows study of the effects of interactions between vehicles. By incorporating a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) based model, discrete particle aircraft each carry a set of unique deterministic and stochastic properties. With this model, aircraft interaction can be studied to better understand how variations in the nondeterministic properties of the system affect its overall efficiency and safety. The tool is structured to be sufficiently flexible as to allow incorporation of different collision detection and avoidance rules for aircraft traffic management. / Master of Science

Increased efficiency at airports is necessary to reduce delays and fuel consumption. Many of the busiest airports in the nation have at least one pair of closely spaced parallel runways (CSPRs), defined by a separation of less than 2500 ft, with one runway dedicated to arrivals and the other to departures. CSPRs experience a large decrease in capacity under instrument conditions because they can no longer operate independently. In order to mitigate this decrease in capacity and to increase efficiency, proposed herein is a departure regulator for runways so configured, along with a plan of study to investigate the effects of this regulator. The proposed departure regulator makes use of data from precision tracking systems such as ADS-B to issue automated or semi-automated departure clearances. Assuming sequential departure separations are sufficient for clearance, the regulator will automatically issue, or advise the controller to issue, the departure clearance as soon as the arrival on the adjacent runway has descended below its decision height. By issuing the departure clearance earlier, the departure regulator reduces the gap between a pair of arrivals that is required to clear a departure. By decreasing the gap, the regulator increases the number of opportunities where a departure clearance can be issued, given a particular arrival stream. A simulation models the effects of the regulator and quantifies the resulting increases in capacity. The simulation results indicate that all forms of the regulator would provide significant gains of between 14% and 23% in capacity over the current operating paradigm. The results also indicate that the capacity gains are greatest at high arrival rates. Therefore, implementation of the departure regulator could significantly decrease the congestion at many major airports during inclement weather.

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