Air Traffic Management Capacity-Driven Operational Concept Through 2015

This paper describes an approach to developing an operational concept for the US National Airspace System. This approach carefully ties the system mission, the functions that the system must perform and the available resources, and presents a logical functional structure for the overall system that ties together functions, resources and subsystems. A key aspect of this approach is a careful flowdown of performance requirements or allocations from toplevel system performance goals through the concept layers down to the technology level to ensure that design decisions will lead to a system that delivers the desired performance. The papers illustrates this approach by defining an operational concept that is driven by system capacity as the primary performance goal, including a logical system transition path from the current system to a higher throughput system for 2015.