Traffic Manager Adviser

Airspace over the United States is divided into 22 areas. The skies within each of these areas are managed by an Air Route Traffic Control Center. At each center, there are controllers designated Traffic Management Coordinators (TMCs), who are responsible for producing a plan to deliver aircraft to a TRACON within the center at just the right time, with proper separation, and at a rate that does not exceed the capacity of the TRACON and destination airports.[267]

The NASA-developed Traffic Manager Adviser tool assists the TMCs in producing and updating that plan. The TMA does this by using graph­ical displays and alerts to increase the TMCs’ situational awareness. The program also computes and provides statistics on the undelayed esti­mated time of arrival to various navigation milestones of an arriving aircraft and even gives the aircraft a runway assignment and scheduled time of arrival (which might later be changed by FAST). This informa-

tion is constantly updated based on live radar updates and controller inputs and remains interconnected with other CTAS tools.[268]