FAA Traffic Flow Management Design Challenge

&gt; <i>Prize: A trophy with the winning university’s name, participating students’ names, and date of award will be displayed at an FAA facility, and a display copy of the trophy will be sent to the lead academic institution. The lead university will be presented with an award of $25,000 and finalist student will each receive a copy of the winning certificate.</i><p>...and quoting from FAA&#x27;s FY 2023 budget submission[1]:<p>&gt; <i>For FY 2023, the FAA’s budget request of $18.6 billion represents an increase of 3.3 percent from the FY 2022 Continuing Resolution (CR) level. When combined with the $5 billion in advanced annual appropriations under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the total FY 2023 funding for FAA is $23.6 billion. This funding level allows the FAA to make continued investments to safeguard the most complex airspace in the world while transforming our aviation infrastructure.</i><p>What a joke.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;dot.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;2022-04&#x2F;FAA_Budget_Estimates_FY2023.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.transportation.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;dot.gov&#x2F;files&#x2F;2022-04&#x2F;F...</a>

If anyone is curious as to what the existing TFMS GUI looks like, NIA has provided the following document which contains some screenshots.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faa-tfm-aid.nianet.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Traffic-Flow-Management-Background_v3.9.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;faa-tfm-aid.nianet.org&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;Traffic-Fl...</a>

It is an interesting idea to use these in mock-ups for the TFMS replacement as long as they were example and not hard HF&#x2F;CHI requirements.<p>I would not trust college students with no experience in HF&#x2F;CHI to create GUI requirements for a mission critical application like TFMS. While it is not safety critical, traffic flow management is mission critical.

Why make this a contest with basically no prize to extract free labor from inexperienced students?<p>Why not, say, hire some actual experts?

Others are griping about this being free labor but consider that often times these types of problems have already been contracted out to someone and have been in development for some time. They may not necessarily be recruiting students to give them a &quot;freebie&quot; but rather someone saw this could be a good learning experience for students and had enough follow through to make it happen. It makes a contact to a university, lets students get real world experience (and resume builders), and there&#x27;s a little incentive.<p>Should some of that incentive go to the student(s)? Sure, but I imagine there&#x27;s legal hoops that are a mess to jump through for that and winning != implementation. Like I said, they&#x27;ve probably got someone contracted for the task and the student could build a job opportunity to said company from it.

Expression of interest due in about 2 hours.

is this a joke?