ABSTRACT
Every day, the airspace of the United States accommodates hundreds of thousands of aircraft movements. Some 70% of all flights occur under instrument flight rules and are thus handled by the nation's air traffic control (ATC) system. Currently, a major ATC center may handle as many as 7,000 flights a day, the majority of them jetliners traveling at airspeeds in excess of 450 knots. The responsibility for the separation of these flights rests with individuals or small teams of controllers, each assigned a volume of airspace, a sector. The controller manages the sector using technologies that, given the traffic loads and the rapid evolution of in-flight avionics, appear anachronistic. For example, some important data pertaining to a flight are currently recorded on small strips of paper, known as flight progress strips (FPSs), whose format and function have changed little since they were introduced in the 1930s and 1940s.
