Over the next 25 years, the number of passengers flying through U.S. airport hubs is expected to skyrocket by almost 70 per cent, to more than 900 million passengers per year. This projected boom in commercial fliers will almost certainly add new planes to an already packed airspace.

   Any local delays, from a congested runway to a weather-related cancellation, could ripple through the aviation system and jam up a significant portion of it, making air traffic controllers’ jobs increasingly difficult.

    “The system is large, and there’s a lot of connectivity,” says Hamsa Balakrishnan, associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. “How do you move along today’s system to be more efficient, and at the same time think about technologies that are lightweight, that you can implement in the tower now?”

   This is one of the questions, Hamsa Balakrishnan who....