Aviation SAA Pilot

For more information please contact innovation@ogc.org

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) SAA Dissemination OGC Pilot demonstrated the feasibility of automating the dissemination and portrayal of Special Activity Airspace (SAA) information (including updates) to National Airspace System (NAS) stakeholders and other external users via OGC Web Services.

The FAA SAA Dissemination Pilot concluded with a final demonstration to FAA on June 2, 2011. All demos presented and referenced material can be found on the FAA SAA Dissemination Pilot Demo page. The results of the Pilot will also be showcased during the FAA Air Transportation Information Exchange Conference (AIXM/WXXM Annual Conference) in Aug/Sep 2011 in Silver Spring MD. 

The objectives of the FAA SAA Dissemination Pilot were three-fold:

1-     Provide access to static and dynamic SAA information via OGC Web Services,

2-     Expose SAA information services to the NAS stakeholders, particularly airlines, to support flight dispatch and planning,

3-     Develop and exercise a standards-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) that can accommodate future requirements related to automated scheduling and information synchronization with the DoD.

The FAA SAA Dissemination OGC Pilot leveraged several OGC standards including Web Feature Service (WFS), Feature Portrayal Service (FPS), (draft) Event Service as well as the Aeronautical Information Exchange Model (AIXM) to support filtering, access, and portrayal of SAA information as well as the notification to subscribed users of SAA updates and schedule changes.

The organizational concept of the FAA SAA Dissemination pilot involved coordination assistance from the Open Geospatial Consortium together with NAS stakeholders with an emphasis on airline partners’ usage of SAA information for flight dispatch and planning purposes. Stakeholders and partners were solicited to provide and deploy hardware/software as well as collaborate on the final architecture and technology design of the pilot.

Navin Vembar, Aeronautical Information Management (AIM) Acquisition Lead, FAA: “The FAA SAA Dissemination pilot proves that OGC Web Services can be used in concert with domain-specific information exchange standards to satisfy the operational needs of a wide variety of users. The use of the standards means that all of the stakeholders’ costs decrease while the benefits of the communication are realized quickly.”

The services developed for the Pilot will continue to be online (and updated with new SAA information as provided by the FAA) for use by the sponsors for demonstration support until mid June 2012.