scope:

Purpose and Scope

The purpose of this document is twofold. First, it extracts and outlines the Action Plan recommendations that are near term procedural enhancements; second, it expands the list to include additional procedural enhancement ideas that have been uncovered elsewhere. Both the Action Plan and the new procedural enhancements have been selected as those that will possibly be added to the NAS in the near term timeframe, but are not associated with any of the FFPl capabilities, or to any of the infrastructure that will be put into place in the same timeframe. The procedural enhancements discussed here have little or no dependence on new automation or systems, depending only on existing or imminent systems or not depending on systems at all. They will provide benefit to the NAS in the same timeframe that FFPl is being implemented, with little requirement for F&E funds.

All the procedural enhancements discussed herein are candidates which might be implemented in the near term; that is, for each, it should be possible to completea nalysis and test of the procedure, and some limited (or occasionally complete) field implementation, by 2002. In some cases, the implementation will be very site specific; in others, it will be possible to perform a national implementation. In fact, several of the enhancements are currently being implemented; these are noted by statements in bold such as "FAA Implementation'' (an example is "Continue expansion of NRP -- alter 200nm radius restriction" #2.13). Some enhancements also are not primarily procedural enhancements, but have procedural aspects and thus have been included in this set for completeness.

This set of procedural candidates represents the current governmenthndustry thinking of potential procedural improvements that can be made in the near term, but is not warranted to be a complete set of possible near term enhancements. New ideas are continuously surfacing, and they should always be considered in addition to the currently existing candidates. Note that overall resource constraints will influence the ability to implement multiple candidates. Consideration of how each improvement supports the Free Flight Operational Concepts and the Free Flight Action Plan should also influence selection for implementation.

With the information provided in this document, FAA and industry representatives should be able to make intelligent decisions about changes and enhancements to procedures that can be made in the near term timeframe