A Data-Driven Approach to Analyze the Development of the United States Air Traffic Management System

Since the Wright Brothers’ Flyer I’, aviation has been developing for over a hundred years. Today, the world’s busiest airports take off and land more than 1,000 flights a day, and the United States, China, and Europe have more than 10,000 simultaneous flights. The safe operation of such a large number of air traffic depends entirely on the continuous guarantee of an air traffic control system. Why was ATC born? What stage of development has it gone through before it reaches today? Where will the future go? Although these problems have been discussed many times, there is still a lack of detailed quantitative research. This paper takes the American air traffic control system as the research object, collects the historical data extensively, adopts the quantitative classification method, and proposes to divide the American air traffic control history into six stages of development. Based on quantitative conclusions, this paper collects literature and summarizes the development characteristics of each stage.