Flight Schedule Monitor

Pioneering ATFM decision support tool enabling NextGen concepts

The Flight Schedule Monitor (FSM) was the world’s first advanced Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) platform and with numerous industry innovations over the past decade remains the cornerstone of system-wide situational awareness and traffic flow control in the National Airspace System (NAS) today. Developed by Metron Aviation in 1998, FSM provides users with up-to-date, real-time information on the future behavior of all flights operating to or from the 800+ largest airports in the country, as well as any flights planned to pass through key regions of the NAS. FSM’s interfaces present information in the format most valuable to the user, whether as a profile of projected demand at an airport over time, detailed information on a specific flight, or any of a number of other specialized views.

Because of the value of the information it provides, FSM is used regularly at over 90 FAA facilities, 7 NAV CANADA facilities and by over 40 airlines, and is an integral part of daily operations management for NAS managers and users. The FAA uses FSM to issue, monitor and manage its most important traffic demand control strategies, including Ground Delay Programs (GDP), Ground Stops (GS) and Airspace Flow Programs (AFP) . When an FAA traffic manager using FSM sees a potential demand/capacity imbalance expected to occur at an airport or somewhere in the airspace, the manager can use the modeling capabilities in FSM to compute the best departure time to assign to each flight to bring demand levels down to the system capacity, and can then use FSM to transmit those departure times directly to both the flight operators and the control towers.

ATFM in the U.S. would not be possible without FSM. In a typical year, the FAA may use FSM 4,000 times to manage airport and airspace demand, affecting five hundred thousand or more flights in the process. FSM allows necessary delays to be taken on the ground rather than in the air. The results are much safer and more efficient, saving flight operators over $400 million per year in fuel costs alone.

FSM was the world's first advanced ATFM platform.

Features

Provides users with up-to-date, real-time information on the future flight behavior

Supplies detailed information on a specific flights Introduces modeling capabilities to compute best departure times

Transmits departure times directly to the flight operators and control towers

Benefits

Provides common situational awareness

Increases safety and efficiency

Reduces fuel costs

Improves flow control

Maximizes capacity

Customer Experience

"Metron Aviation successfully delivered Flight Schedule Monitor (FSM) to the FAA in 1998. FSM has been deployed system-wide in the U.S. National Airspace System (NAS) system-wide since 1999 and its capabilities have saved users more than 54 million minutes of delays and nearly $5b in savings. Metron Aviation’s software continues to be the building-block technology which supports all of the Traffic Flow Management automation toolsets.”

Mike Sammartino,
Director of System Operations,
FAA ATCSCC