Evaluation of the national airspace system aggregate performance sensitivity

This paper describes research involving advanced traffic flow management concepts and solutions in the national airspace system. We summarize our tools and methods, and describe NAS performance metrics and sensitivities. Our results indicate that in addition traffic volume and delay, congestion is an important NAS performance metric. Our results also show that NAS performance is highly sensitive to the degree of delay distribution in the TFM solution. NAS performance is also sensitive to the agility of the TFM system. Finally, NAS performance is only slightly sensitive to forecasting improvements of traffic loading and weather.