LEXINGTON, Mass. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Flying can be stressful. Add in thunder and lightning, and it's bound to strike a nerve. Now, physicists are helping find the friendliest route in those sometimes unfriendly skies.
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Bad weather and delays are a flyer's worst fears.
"I think it's very depressing, and it can lead you to a sense of feeling desperate," airline traveler Joanne Brophy told Ivanhoe.
A new computer program is helping air traffic controllers find safer, alternative routes.
"A thunderstorm is causing trouble on the route, but as time moves on,
you see the thunderstorm starts to move away from the route," Rich DeLaura
a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Lexington, Mass., told Ivanhoe.
DeLaura and his team of weather system experts used the science of operations research to create the Route Availability Planning Tool, or RAPT. This software combines departure route geometry with weather forecasts of the height and intensity of storms along the route.
"We combine those into a forecast that tells you where we think pilots will be willing to fly and where we think pilots will not want to fly," DeLaura said.
Green means go, red is a no and yellow means more data is needed. Currently, four airports in the New York and New Jersey area use RAPT.
"If they identify that your route is blocked and can identify an alternate route to get out, your plane will get out maybe sooner than it might have," DeLaura said.
Over a one-year period, regular use of RAPT saves an estimated 2,000 hours of departure delays, resulting in $7.5 million saved.
The American Meteorological Society, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, and the Mathematical Association of America contributed to the information contained in the TV portion of this report.
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Flying can be stressful. Add in thunder and lightning, and it's bound to strike a nerve. Now, physicists are helping find the friendliest route in those sometimes unfriendly skies.
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