Within the German Aerospace Center (DLR) project FAGI (Future Air Ground Integration), new operational concepts and automation support systems for fuel-and noise-efficient arrival management are being developed. An essential element of the FAGI concept is a modified airspace and route structure, featuring the late merging of different arrival routes to support user-preferred flight profiles such as Continuous Descent Approaches (CDA). The present paper studies aircraft ghosting solutions on the radar display as a potential means to support controllers with merging different streams of aircraft with sufficient precision. In addition to a technical presentation of different ghosting principles, the results of two human in the loop studies are reported. Using objective and subjective data on performance, workload, situation awareness, and eye-tracking analysis, the benefits, trade-offs and acceptance of the visual assistance functions are discussed.

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The growth of air transport demand expected over the next decades, along with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfalls and severe storms due to climate change, will pose a tough challenge for air traffic management systems, with implications for flight safety, delays and passengers. In this context, the Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM (SINOPTICA) project has a dual aim, first to investigate if very short-range high-resolution weather forecast, including data assimilation, can improve the predictive capability of these events, and then to understand if such forecasts can be suitable for air traffic management purposes. The intense squall line that affected Malpensa, the major airport by passenger traffic in northern Italy, on 11 May 2019 is selected as a benchmark. Several numerical experiments are performed with a Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using two assimilation techniques, 3D-Var in WRF Data Assimilation (WRFDA) system and a nudging scheme for lightning, in order to improve the forecast accuracy and to evaluate the impact of assimilated different datasets. To evaluate the numerical simulations performance, three different verification approaches, object-based, fuzzy and qualitative, are used. The results suggest that the assimilation of lightning data plays a key role in triggering the convective cells, improving both location and timing. Moreover, the numerical weather prediction (NWP)-based nowcasting system is able to produce reliable forecasts at high spatial and temporal resolution. The timing was found to be suitable for helping Air Traffic Management (ATM) operators to compute alternative landing trajectories.

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