Creating the Future of Aviation: Technical and Professional Activities 2016

This publication is the seventeenth annual compendium of technical and professional accomplishments from MITRE’s Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD). The booklet documents the many significant outreach and collaboration actions of MITRE staff in support of CAASD’s mission: serving the public interest by advancing the safety, security, effectiveness, and efficiency of aviation in the United States and around the world.

This continues to be an exciting time for the aviation and aerospace communities. Unmanned aircraft and commercial space vehicles are inspiring innovative new business opportunities, but bring new operational and technical challenges in preserving the high level of safety and efficiency in today’s system. New technologies, such as autonomy, mobile computing, data analytics, machine learning, and advanced sensors, will play a part in this evolving landscape, but also present research challenges. As the FAA deploys NextGen capabilities, which are now being widely used in daily air traffic management operations, new procedures and technologies offer airspace users opportunities for significant operational improvement and safety enhancement.

This is a highly collaborative community—one that relies on the free exchange of ideas and full consideration of all stakeholder viewpoints. In that spirit, CAASD staff publish and present extensively in order to share our ideas, obtain community feedback, and understand new perspectives. The papers, patents, awards, and other technical contributions documented here are testaments to the collaborative spirit of our staff. The contributions and achievements documented here highlight the critical role CAASD and other MITRE staff are playing in making new ideas in aviation and aerospace operations a reality.