Centerlines - April 2008 - (Page 42) NEW TECHNOLOGY THE INTEGRATED AIRPORT B Y JODI R IC H A R DS Public-private partnership leads path to airport of the future his year Daytona Beach International Airport will serve as a test bed for emerging technologies from across the industry designed to streamline and optimize airport operations. Under a partnership led by EmbryRiddle Aeronautical University and Lockheed Martin, the Integrated Airport Project, an open, public-private partnership, will bring together industry leaders in the pursuit of the next generation (NextGen) in airport technology solutions. The integration and collaboration of the technology and industry partners will be critical to the success of the project. The project, funded through the FAA with a $1.96 million congressional earmark for this year, will evaluate new technologies to see which can best help airports predict weather conditions and improve “ground surface management” -- the management of an airport’s runways and taxiways -- said Christina FrederickRecascino, Embry-Riddle’s vice president of research and institutional effectiveness. The project should lead to recommendations for the implementation of new technology to ease congestion at airports through better management of ground surfaces and better communication. T Revolutionizing the “Air Portal” Frederick-Recascino said the focus of the partnership is “revolutionizing the air traffic system for the 21st century”—what she called the “air portal,” defi ned as the airspace in and around the airport as well as the surface of the airport (runways, taxiways, etc.). The project will test technology designed to effectively and efficiently manage airport operations such as arrival and departure management through better communication, “so that we make congestion less apparent at the airport level.” Don Zarefoss, director of aviation strategy at Lockheed Martin, argued that it has been evident over the last 50 years that airports have comparatively become less automated than the other domains of the national airspace. “We saw [the integrated Airport Project] as an opportunity to bring some new technology, some NextGen concepts into the airport environment, with the hope of accelerating some of the performance enhancements for efficiency and capacity that the airports are going to need very, very soon,” he said. Technology demo day, November 2007: Jim Bocchi, Lockheed Martin system architect, makes entries at the local automated radar terminal system (ARTS) color display in surface mode to observe aircraft moving on the airport surface. 42 CENTERLINES | APRIL 2008
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