Air Transportation Centers of Excellence

FY2025 During Fiscal Year 2025, FAA's five active COE's with public-private partnerships throughout the United States with academic institutions other affiliates successfully performed research for a wide range of topic areas.

The FAA Center of Excellence for Alternative Jet Fuels and Environment, also known as the Aviation Sustainability Center (ASCENT), continues to pave the way for sustainable aviation through its innovative research program. ASCENT now includes over 80 projects covering critical issues in aviation including emissions, noise, operations, aircraft technologies, and supersonics. ASCENT research continues to advance the area of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a topic of growing importance. ASCENT researchers play key roles in the development and deployment of SAF, working to test and certify fuels to ensure both safety and sustainability. The Clearinghouse coordinates testing and original equipment manufacturer (OEM) review of new fuels.

The FAA Center of Excellence for General Aviation continues to enhance general aviation safety, accessibility, and sustainability by partnering the FAA with a national network of world-class researchers, educators and industry leaders. The program accomplished a successful PEGASAS annual meeting this year, which provided an opportunity for the PEGASAS researchers to share their research with invited attendees, to receive feedback from the FAA and the Advisory Board, to recognize outstanding research staff and students, and to network with each other to foster continued collaboration. The PEGASAS 2024 Annual Meeting was located at the FAA William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, NJ on Jun 11-12, 2024. PEGASAS researchers shared project updates with their project sponsors and FAA colleagues, students from all PEGASAS universities held poster sessions, and the Advisory Board provided valuable feedback on the research progress and future direction.

The FAA Joint Center of Excellence for Advanced Materials (JAMS) created the First Public Database for Additive Manufacturing. Additive manufacturing (AM) presents significant opportunities for several applications to produce parts with low lead times and close to the point of use. AM has not been fully realized due to high manufacturing variability, uncertainty of the performance effects of material defects, and the lack of pedigreed data and widely-accepted methodologies/standards for qualifying materials and processes. In partnership with the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Air Force Research Laboratory, Wichita State University National Institute for Aviation Research (WSU-NIAR) conducted a program under the FAA Joint Advanced Materials & Structures Center of Excellence (JAMS) to qualify an additively manufactured material. Through this program, WSU-NIAR also partnered with America Makes to form a team from rp+m (a small business in Ohio), Stratasys, and Lockheed Martin. This team then solidified a partnership with the National Center for Advanced Material Performance (NCAMP) at WSU-NIAR. NCAMP works closely with the FAA, DoD, and aerospace industry to qualify material systems and provide material and process (M&P) specifications and performance data to the aerospace community. A government steering committee and industry technical advisory team of aviation OEMs supported the program.

Through the University of Oklahoma and FAA's Civil Aerospace Medical Institute, the Center of Excellence for Technical Training and Human Performance (COE TTHP) delivered critical research entitled “Characterization and Application of Air Traffic Controllers Visual Search Patterns and Control Strategies for Efficient and Effective Training”. The goal of this work was to understand how experienced controllers visually search, select, compare, and control multiple aircraft under different situations to develop concrete training examples of visual scanning and aircraft control strategies related to enroute conflict detection and resolution. Five dominant visual search patterns were discovered: spiral, circular, linear, quadrant, and mixed. Other diverse strategies were discovered based on factors such as conflict types, sector characteristics, and customer service priorities.

The Center of Excellence for Unmanned Aircraft Systems continues to provide high-quality research and support to autonomy stakeholders both within the US and beyond to safely and efficiently integrate autonomous systems into the national and international infrastructure, thereby increasing commerce and overall public safety and benefit. This year marks 10-years of focusing on UAS airworthiness and certification, detect and avoid (DAA) technologies, human factors in UAS operations, UAS traffic management (UTM) and integration with manned aircraft, and risk assessment and management for UAS operations. In addition, ASSURE leads to research in many arenas such as disaster prep, recovery, multi-aircraft control, cybersecurity, autonomy a