Advanced short-runway airliners and large commercial tiltrotors could boost the capacity of the U.S. air transport system without impacting conventional aircraft operations, once the FAA's NextGen airspace system is fully implemented.

That's the conclusion of a NASA-funded study into the integration of advanced vehicles into NextGen conducted by a Sensis-led research team.

Emerging new aircraft types, such as Cruise-Efficient Short Take-Off and Landing (CESTOL) transport aircraft, have the potential to positively affect the efficiency and capacity of the NextGen Air Transportation System, according to the research recently completed by Sensis.

Under the NASA contract, the team analyzed the impact of five advanced vehicles in NextGen scenarios. In addition to a CESTOL vehicle, the team investigated Large Commercial Tiltrotor Aircraft (LCTR), an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), a Very Light Jet (VLJ) and a Supersonic Transport (SST).

"The Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO) has indicated that projected future travel demand in 2025 is only 80 percent accommodated if NextGen is implemented without taking into account these new vehicles," said Ken Kaminski, vice president of Sensis Advanced Development. "Depending on how these new vehicles are incorporated, the unique performance characteristics of each vehicle can address potential shortfalls in accommodating future travel demands."

The research team - comprised of Sensis, Georgia Tech, CSSI, ATAC, L-3 Communications, Honeywell and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology - examined the five vehicles in terms of performance, safety and environmental impact.

In terms of safety, each vehicle operates in some new and unique ways and therefore poses unique safety considerations that need to be addressed with vehicle-specific procedural, training and technological solutions. This study identified critical safety issues such as a CESTOL's approach and descent characteristics and VLJ risks associated with potentially shifting the number of flight crew from two to one to meet operational financial requirements.

"This NASA sponsored research establishes that these new vehicles hold great promise to positively impact air travel in the future, particularly in terms of meeting the projected air travel demand without adversely affecting overall NAS performance," said Kaminski. "Now is the time to start developing the unique processes and tools needed to effectively incorporate them into NextGen in a safe manner as these vehicles possess different performance characteristics than conventional aircraft."

The NASA Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate contract is entitled "Integration of Advanced Concepts and Vehicles into the Next Generation Air Transportation System.

In the area of performance, the research determined that CESTOL and LCTR have the highest potential to positively affect passenger capacity as CESTOLs and LCTRs could serve underused airports in dense metroplex regions (a complex regional airspace encompassing multiple airports of varying size) as well as fly arrival and departure routes into congested major airports that are procedurally separate from the conventional traffic routes.

Many large airports have shorter runways that are underutilized today and, by utilizing these, the CESTOL and LCTR provide significant new runway capacity. The combination of these benefits, realizable under NextGen methodologies, is a significant improvement in capacity and reliability at the nation's most congested airports and along many of the most congested routes.