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. [Read more →]
by Jenni Chasteen, Marketing Assistant · September 8th, 2008 
