What capability-development tasks should be funded to enable a Next-Generation Air Transportation System?
The United States has set a goal of enabling a Next-Generation Air Transportation (NGAT) System by the year 2025 to provide for substantially increased capacity while improving — or at least not worsening — safety, security, and environmental impact. The Joint Program Development Office coordinates the various agencies involved (including NASA and the FAA) in support of this effort. NASA contributes primarily as an R&D provider of enhanced technologies and capabilities, and its Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate (ARMD) initiated this study as part of an effort to formulate and assess the potential return on investment (ROI) for candidate capability-development tasks. Like most START projects, this study involved determining a value for each of many competing capabilities, and using those values to compute optimal capability-development portfolios at various budgets. However, this study expanded the methodology used in other recent studies in two primary ways: • We included rang
