Enabling New Airspace Features for a More Complex and Growing NAS

The FAA is working to modernize and expand the U.S. national airspace system (NAS) with the goal of increasing air transportation system capacity, enhancing airspace safety, and reducing delays by implementing new capabilities like digital communications, advanced navigation, air traffic control automation system upgrades, and weather integration. Today’s NAS supports roughly 45,000 daily flights across the U.S.—but it’s showing signs of strain. The FAA projects increased traffic volume, necessitating faster upgrades to an aging technological infrastructure that’s struggling to support current operations efficiently and resiliently.

For pilots, air traffic control modernization potentially means significant changes to daily flight operations, including new flightdeck procedures, updated communication protocols, and advanced flight management systems that will require adaptation and ongoing training. Without these upgrades, pilots will experience increasingly congested airspace, longer delays, and more complex operational challenges that could compromise both efficiency and safety. This is why NASA’s System-Wide Safety (SWS) project, which focuses on aeronautics safety research and development, is playing a crucial role in assisting the FAA with this technological modernization process while maintaining and improving the safety of the future NAS.

SWS focuses on aeronautics safety research and development, with a mission to explore, understand, and overcome technical challenges that could affect the safety of future aviation systems. This includes both how systems are designed and how they operate in the real world. Through research, industry collaboration, and technology transfer, SWS helps identify current and future safety needs, including those identified by pilots, and develops tools, technologies, and procedures to help close these gaps, especially as new and improved safety solutions come online.

In the June-July issue of Air Line Pilot, we highlighted NASA’s work on operational safety—how NASA helps pilots fly with greater safety awareness and assurance. In this article, we’re focusing on SWS’s design assurance—the science and discipline behind building safety into aviation systems from the ground up and what this will mean for pilots on the flight deck.

What Is Design Assurance?

Design assurance is the systematic process that ensures advanced technologies meet the required safety standards before they reach the flight deck. For pilots, this isn’t just a technical detail—it’s the critical foundation that determines whether new technologies will enhance or compromise pilots’ ability to operate safely. This standardized approach occurs at all levels of system design—the aircraft, system, and item level (e.g., software items, hardware items, etc.)—and involves a combination of rigorous design, development, verification, and validation activities guided by standards like RTCA DO-178C for software and RTCA DO-254 for hardware.

The level of assurance is categorized into Design Assurance Levels (DALs) based on the potential impact of a system’s failure on aircraft safety. DALs directly translate to operational reliability that pilots can depend on. Aircraft design assurance is a standardized and structured approach that proceeds in parallel with the aircraft design process. The goal is to ensure that every system pilots and aviation professionals might interact with is built according to its requirements and that the completed system meets targeted levels of safety as well as current and future operating needs.

Why It Matters Now

The FAA’s vision for the future NAS includes widespread use of advanced technologies like digital communications data links, automation, autonomy, and artificial intelligence (AI). While automation typically follows predefined rules, autonomy implies a higher level of independence, where a system adapts to changing circumstances and makes decisions independently. AI refers to systems performing tasks that traditionally require human intelligence.

The design of these technologies is intended to enhance and support, rather than replace, what pilots do better than any machine—harness creativity and intuition, adapt, problem solve, and stay resilient in dynamic conditions. However, to unlock these benefits safely, these systems must be assured—thoroughly tested, understood, and integrated without introducing unacceptable risk. When these technologies undergo appropriate design-assurance processes, pilots can develop reliable mental models of system behavior during normal operations, abnormal situations, and emergency conditions while maintaining clear human-machine interfaces that preserve pilot authority and decision-making capabilities.

This is where NASA’s SWS project comes in. NASA is assisting in the development of safety technologies, tools, techniques, methods, and procedures to help ensure these systems are introduced and managed responsibly and safely, while ensuring pilots are aware of design-related risks so that they remain prepared and informed. Importantly, pilots themselves contribute valuable input by advising which functions should be automated and when, establishing who has authority and responsibility for safe execution of functions in flight, and helping determine the most effective techniques to ensure that these functions work as intended in real-world operations.

Innovating for Safety—And Safely Innovating

We’re entering a new era in advanced aviation safety analysis—one driven by smarter tools, more powerful software, and deeper integration of human and machine teaming. But innovation alone isn’t enough. The technologies that power tomorrow’s air transportation system must be implemented thoughtfully and never outpace the ability to manage, assure, and ensure safety. Design assurance serves as a pilot’s safety net and gatekeeper in an era of rapid technological advancement.

It’s the disciplined, systematic approach that ensures advanced technologies enhance, rather than compromise, flight safety, maintaining the pilot’s role as the ultimate authority while providing the tools and confidence needed to operate safely in an increasingly complex NAS. Together with ALPA and other valued partners, NASA is proving that the future of the NAS can be both ambitious and safe. We can innovate for safety—and safely innovate.

Ensuring that the Highest Level of Operational Safety Is Maintained

By Capt. Chris Sidor (United), Chair, ALPA Aircraft Design & Operations Group

When we change a radio frequency or amend the route in our flight management computer, we may not think twice about doing it. However, the engineering and certification requirements necessary for even a small change to these systems entail substantial work to ensure that the highest level of operational safety is maintained.

ALPA’s Aircraft Design & Operations (ADO) Group—composed of pilot volunteers who have diverse backgrounds in certification, engineering, and operations—is extensively involved with the FAA, manufacturers, and other industry stakeholders, bringing the pilot point of view on how we interact with these systems. We focus not only on current technologies, but also on new technologies to ensure that these routine tasks are completed in the safest way possible.

Certification requirements for these systems require that a thorough risk assessment be completed to evaluate potential system failures. From this assessment, the risk associated with a failure is determined, as is the failure level to which the system is designed. This happens for nearly all aircraft systems and components, from avionics to systems supporting flight controls. The ADO Group collaborates with industry stakeholders to ensure that the line-pilot operational perspective is included in how we design and utilize these systems.

This has become an increasingly challenging task for the members of the ADO Group, given the introduction of new technologies into our aircraft. With new automation systems, the group works to ensure that these technologies provide accurate and relevant information for pilots on the flight deck, supporting our situational awareness.

The group voices the line pilot’s viewpoint and priorities—monitoring and opposing regulatory exemptions that would provide an unacceptably lower design-assurance level for systems that should have more stringent requirements. Systematic analyses are used to determine appropriate assurance levels when additional risks are identified, and ADO Group members work with government and industry to ensure these assurance levels are met or exceeded. We’re currently advocating for a higher assurance level for weather-detection systems, following multiple real-world events that have highlighted the need for the increase.

There are multiple new and promising technologies at various stages of the certification process. These technologies can help us perform our jobs, but they must be integrated into the aircraft in a way that makes us aware of any new risks these technologies introduce and ensures that those risks are managed. Improving situational awareness for the two pilots on the flight deck is a win-win for the industry. This is made possible through the daily work of the ADO Group, whose members ensure that we safely achieve system improvements while considering how at least two pilots operate the aircraft and its systems.