Integrated Air Surveillance Concept of Operations - Joint Planning ...

Integrated Air Surveillance Concept of Operations
7 Summary of Impacts
7.1 Summary of Operational Impacts
Adoption of the desired operational and system capabilities described in Sections 3 and 4 of this
IS ConOps will have far-reaching effects. Increased use of integrated sensors and net-centric
information-sharing capabilities of integrated air surveillance systems will increase the safety,
capacity, and efficiency of routine air traffic management and enable DoD and DHS to locate
and identify commercial and general aviation aircraft more quickly and more effectively. Shared
situational awareness will be greatly improved between stakeholders, facilities, NAS users and
the FAA.
Automated-data and information-sharing capabilities in the near term should provide the
following:
Prompt identification of the same track; and for legally authorized agencies, immediate
access to intelligence and other information pertaining to flights, their crews, passengers,
cargo, and possible threat associations
Aircraft type and tail number, supplemented by any information about the aircraft’s
history, flight plans, and presence of Federal Air Marshals and potentially suspicious
persons on board the aircraft can impact the risk level associated with any given flight
Ready access to information from diverse sources will aid surveillance partners in
achieving the most robust possible situational awareness in the shortest possible time,
thereby enabling better, more timely decisions when dealing with both routine and
anomalous air transportation activities
Near real-time information gathered through newly automated information-sharing
capabilities
Collectively, these capabilities will enable more accurate and timely decisions with less risk. No
longer will the opening minutes of a DEN conference have to be spent with each agency trying
to identify which track on its watch screen is the same track that appears on the watch screens of
the other agencies. No exchanges of rudimentary information about the flight will be required to
bring surveillance mission partners up-to-speed on the unfolding situation, as that information
will have been accessible and/or disseminated automatically to everyone with a need to know.
Watch screens can be tailored by individual operators to reduce clutter by displaying only
requested information, thereby allowing users to monitor suspicious and/or unknown tracks
quickly and confidently. Conversely, watch personnel can be confident that basic changes in a
flight’s status, particularly changes in security status, will be automatically updated and widely
disseminated, even if the flight track was previously removed from the screen. Automated alerts
concerning changes in a flight’s security will lessen the need for visual confirmation that an
aircraft has left the bounds of its flight trajectory. Operations personnel will thus not only start
from a higher level of shared situational awareness, but they will not be overly burdened by the
information overload that can arise from having to sort and monitor all tracks manually. The
operational result of this will be more timely response decisions.
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