Surface Management System

Making the skyways safer for aircraft to fly by reducing delays and lowering the stress on the system begins and ends with the short jour­ney on the ground between the active runway and the terminal gate. To better coordinate events between the air and ground sides, NASA devel­oped, in cooperation with the FAA, a software tool called the Surface Management System (SMS), whose purpose is to manage the move­ments of aircraft on the surface of busy airports to improve capacity, efficiency, and flexibility.[261]

The SMS has three parts: a traffic management tool, a controller tool, and a National Airspace System information tool.[262]

The traffic management tool monitors aircraft positions in the sky and on the ground, along with the latest times when a departing air­liner is about to be pushed back from its gate, to predict demand for taxiway and runway usage, with an aim toward understanding where backups might take place. Sharing this information among the traffic control tools and systems allows for more efficient planning. Similarly, the controller tool helps personnel in the ATC and ramp towers to bet­ter coordinate the movement of arriving and departing flights and to

advise pilots on which taxiways to use as they navigate between the runway and the gate.[263] Finally, the NAS information tool allows data from the SMS to be passed into the FAA’s national Enhanced Traffic Management System, which in turn allows traffic controllers to have a more accurate picture of the airspace.[264]