Airports use CSC app

As air travel mushrooms for this week's holiday, some airport officials are using an application developed by Computer Sciences Corp. to keep traffic running smoothly.

The holiday season tests the limits of air traffic controllers, who face problems with poor traffic flows that reduce airport capacity and force airplanes to remain in holding patterns above the ground. To help allay airport congestion, CSC officials developed Traffic Management Advisor, an electronic decision-support tool that helps air traffic controllers optimize the traffic flow using a method called time-based metering.

"It tries to sequence traffic to give controllers a nice flow," said Carl Robinson, director of Federal Aviation Administration programs for CSC's Transportation Solution Center. "They want to see planes coming in so many miles apart. It uses track data, flight data and weather data [and] calculates out, using certain algorithms, for the sequence of airplanes. An example would be if you were flying to Atlanta.