Safety Dashboard Launches: One Safety Picture, From the Final Approach to the Gate
The Safety Dashboard, developed with NASA sponsorship, follows each flight through terminal airspace and across the airport surface, measures and monitors its margins against FAA separation rules, and rates every runway Nominal, Stressed or At Risk. Every finding can be replayed.
Cignus has launched the Safety Dashboard, an integrated view of terminal airspace and airport surface safety developed with NASA sponsorship.
An aircraft on approach doesn't become a different problem when it touches down. Yet terminal airspace and the airport surface are usually monitored separately, by different tools against different measures. The Safety Dashboard follows each flight continuously from terminal airspace through landing, taxi and departure, and measures and monitors its margins against FAA separation rules at every stage.
It rebuilds every aircraft and ground vehicle from FAA SWIM data — SFDPS en-route and terminal positions joined to STDDS (ASDE-X) surface tracks, one track per aircraft. In the air, it watches the protected buffers around each aircraft, the vectoring and spacing on approach, and the margins between consecutive arrivals. On the ground, it times every departure, arrival, runway crossing and vehicle movement, and checks each pair of operations at the same instant. Both feed one rating per runway and airport: Nominal, Stressed or At Risk. The rating compares each hour with past hours that had the same configuration, weather and traffic, so a busy IFR hour is judged against other busy IFR hours.
Every finding opens a replay from approach to rollout, with the actual and required separation side by side. Daily and weekly reports cover airspace, runways and taxiways, and past events can be reconstructed with the weather, NOTAMs and traffic flow of the time.
"Approach spacing and runway crossings have always been watched by different people with different tools, so the moments where one squeezes the other were nobody's picture. The Safety Dashboard measures both against the same FAA separation rules and rates each hour against hours like it — and when it flags something, you can watch exactly what happened." — Florian Hafner, PhD, Chief Technology Officer, Cignus
Capabilities, data sources and access are on the Safety Dashboard solution page.