The FAA and NASA are currently collaborating on the continued research and development of SMS/SDSS. Mosaic ATM currently supports NASA in the development of a data mining and analysis tool for airport surface research, as well as in the expansion of the SMS concept and system. The culmination of this collaborative research between Mosaic ATM, NASA and the FAA will be the development and deployment by the FAA of an advanced ATC Tower automation system. The integration of AASR into this advanced ATC Tower automation system will allow tower controllers to continue to operate using the verbal command and control approach that is most conducive to safe and efficient operations, while the advanced ATC automation system will be able to receive electronic data without requiring additional user entries and manual workload.
The capabilities of the proposed ATC automatic speech recognition capability as have been presented in this proposal would provide significant usefulness to NASA and the FAA in the research and analysis of future NGATS airportal and airspace concepts. Because ATC clearances are issued by verbal command via a radio channel, there is currently no easy way to obtain large amounts of reliable data regarding the clearances that are issued to aircraft. For research efforts that have required ATC clearance data, it has been necessary to obtain the data through manual observation and recording of clearances issues, or by laborious and time-consuming manual review and transcription of recorded ATC audio tapes. However, access to such clearance information would provide additional insights and understanding regarding the strategies and limitations of the air traffic controller for NASA research efforts.
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