Graceful Degradation of TBO Automation

Implementation of Trajectory Based Operations (TBO) to date has been limited to a subset of the National Airspace Systemrsquo;s (NASrsquo;s) operating environment. The result is that key TBO systems, such as TBFM, are not functional and are turned off at times when unable to support the current NAS operating conditions.nbsp; To fulfill the promise of TBO, systems like TBFM need to be robust to the broad spectrum of NAS operating conditions. ATCorprsquo;s TBO Operational Transition Automation (TOTA) provides automation to assist the human operator with the ability to safely and efficiently transition from one set of NAS operating conditions to another while maintaining a trajectory based operation.nbsp; For example, if weather impacts the nominal planned trajectory of a set of flights arriving at a busy NAS airport and the aircraft are required to be vectored around the weather, the current TBFM system does not support this maneuvering of flights and TBFM is no longer used to provide time-base metering. TOTA, however, provides automation to allow the controller to reflect the vectoring maneuvers around the weather in the TBFM system, allowing TBFM to support time based metering for this operational weather scenario.