The Luggage Blog

Researchers at MIT are trying to improve a tool they’ve developed to reduce flight weather delays.  Their prototype in New York City cut delays by 2300 hours and saved over $7 million in costs.  The research team, led by Richard DeLaura of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Weather Sensing Group, hopes that by fully implementing the Route Availability Planning Tool (RAPT) they will save 8,800 hours and $28 million per year in New York alone.

Currently air traffic managers acquire weather information and have to make an educated guess in their minds as to what weather conditions will do and what flights are safe to deploy.  Trying to estimate rapidly changing weather patterns to decide what flights to let out can be too time consuming and the focus usually remains on landing planes already in the air, leaving scheduled flights grounded.  And yet another problem arises when too many flights are grounded and there’s no room for arriving planes to land.

DeLaura’s team is aiming to alleviate some of that burden with RAPT.  RAPT calculates the best course of action when determining what flights should take off as scheduled and what flights are too risky to send out.  It factors this information based on the route, precipitation forecasts, the height of storms as well as a model for pilot behavior in thunderstorms, even estimating how likely a pilot would be to avoid weather along their route.  From all of that RAPT displays a map and chart that lists departure times highlighted based on weather conditions. (Pictured above).  Red indicates that a route is blocked, yellow represents heavy weather that could cause problems, while dark green indicates some light weather, and light green indicates clear skies.

With this technology air traffic managers will no longer have to estimate complicated weather patterns, but can make decisions from a clearly laid out chart which accounts for all possible variables, resulting in less delayed flights.

Read more about RAPT at MIT News