Air Traffic Solutions

The skies are getting busier every day, with new types of aircraft aiming to provide innovative air travel services that seek to improve all of our lives, whether that means delivering cargo to your front door or providing personalized taxi service across town. NASA is working with its government and industry partners to keep the sky lanes open, efficient, and safer than ever before. Follow their work here.

Airplane outside it's gate at the airport.

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The air traffic solutions NASA is working on today build from a foundation of research that goes back decades. Three recently concluded projects in particular are helping to develop new ways of doing things in the 21st century. The two features presented here help tell those project’s stories.

A Story for Axel: Big Ideas for Better Air Mobility with Drones of all Sizes

In this essay from 2021 — which was originally presented as a three-part web feature — NASA Aeronautics’ senior writer Jim Banke tells his newborn grandson, Axel, the story of how two recently concluded major air traffic management research projects by NASA will help achieve a long-held vision for the future of aviation.

Read this Story About NASA's Air Traffic Solutions

A man holds a baby who is imagining a future vision for aviation.

As NASA Aeronautics senior writer Jim Banke tells his grandson, Axel, about two recently concluded research projects involving drones large and small, Axel appears to be imagining what the major elements of that future as told to him by his grandpa might be.

NASA/ Jim Banke, Lillian Gipson

NASA Delivers on Making Gate to Gate Flights More Efficient

In this story from March 2022, a summary of NASA's three-part Airspace Technology Demonstration (ATD) project is presented. It details how a team of NASA's aeronautical innovators working with government and industry partners spent fives years developing and demonstrating new tools to help you fly from here to there in the most time-efficient, fuel-saving, and cost-effective manner possible.

Read this Story About ATD

Researchers Al Capps (seated) and Paul Borchers demonstrate Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) tools that air traffic managers began testing in 2017.

At NASA’s air traffic management laboratory near the Dallas/Ft. Worth International Airport in Texas, researchers Al Capps (seated) and Paul Borchers demonstrate Airspace Technology Demonstration 2 (ATD-2) tools that air traffic managers began testing in 2017.

NASA / Jim Banke

Air traffic controllers test NASA-developed concepts in FutureFlight Central, an ultra-realistic, 360-degree, simulated control tower at NASA Ames Research Center.

NASA / Dominic Hart