Metrics
The impact of weather on air travel is a large and ever-growing burden. Most delays, diversions, cancellations, excess fuel usage, and missed connections—and many accidents—are caused by weather. Unexpected weather events can result in reduced capacity as air traffic managers and airline operation centers reduce flights and simultaneously use remaining capacity to direct the already airborne flights toward their destinations. AvMet develops metric programs to better understand avoidable delays and the ways weather impacts can be better predicted and their effects better mitigated. Our work improves the content, communication, and integration of weather into air traffic decision making to ensure that traffic management is both efficient and accurate. Specifically, AvMet develops and coordinates aviation weather performance metrics and tools that work to improve the quality of weather forecasts to help significantly reduce the impact of weather and save money.