Description: FutureFlight Central Promotional Video Final Script, October 25, 2001.

Description: Introduction Narration - NASA Logo Movement in the background.

Description: Layered panoramic views of busy aircraft activity and the interior of control tower activity in the background.
Narration: Experience the future of your airport - Controllers talk in the background.

Nancy Dorighi,
Manager, FutureFlight Central
“FutureFlight Central is a state of the art tool for airports to do planning, technology integration and procedure development, all to improve their capacity and safety. It actually uses virtual reality to depict what goes on in an airport.”

Lydia Kennard
Executive Director, Los Angeles World Airports
“FutureFlight Central is very cost effective for us as an airport operator. It allows us to fast forward and test different types of interventions before we begin the construction, before we invest a lot of dollars and that is what is so valuable about the simulation.”

Nancy Dorighi
Manager, FutureFlight Central
“We modeled one of the proposed configurations for the changes at San Francisco [International] Airport and we were able to show the controllers and the SFO operations people what the new configuration would look like from several different proposed tower locations.”

Matthew Mead
Airfield Development, San Francisco International Airport
“In the simulation we looked at a number of criteria for evaluating each tower location. For instance, one of the first criteria was the viewing angle, the depth perception, could you see if a plane was on a runway or a taxiway? The time of day was an important issue: [these are] the issues of what you see in daytime versus nighttime. We also learned to appreciate other factors that controllers go through in the planning process - unless you’re a controller you might not appreciate that workload. Trying to reduce their workload makes for a safer, [more] efficient operation.”

Lydia Kennard
Executive Director, Los Angeles World Airports
“They looked at ways that we could reduce the number of runway incursions on our airfield. We’ve been very challenged by that and they basically simulated operations to see what could be done and they recommended a new taxiway.”

Nancy Dorighi
Manager, FutureFlight Central
“This facility really is designed to include human evaluations of new technologies. You can configure an airport the way you think it will be ten years down the road. You can try changes and you can measure the impact on each person’s job. Are they going to have more transmissions to do, more things to keep track of, or can we figure out ways, by providing new displays, to offload them with some of that workload? We really have a lot of control over what we test against the humans.”

Description: Facility, Construction, Ramp Operation visuals in the background.
Narration Four - FutureFlight Central is a remarkable achievement. Airport planners can evaluate new facilities before construction begins. New procedures can be tested; new technologies can be accurately monitored, and operators can be trained on new systems before they are introduced. And the future promises even more The next phase of simulations will enable FutureFlight Central to coordinate its operations with multiple pilots in cockpit simulators anywhere in the world. In time, next generation telecommunications will enable the facility to run any modeled airport remotely. For example, taking over during an emergency, providing in effect, virtual control for a real airport.