Clustering of Flight Tracks

Airports are experiencing heavy capacity utilization leading to increased airport congestion and delay. It is therefore of great interest to identify the source of deficiencies in order to apply mitigation measures at the right place. Regarding the airside airport capacity, it is of concern to estimate practicable (or unimpeded) arrival times for arriving aircraft. In this paper we describe how prevalent flight routes can be found automatically out of a comprehensive set of arrival flight trajectories. By means of the proposed procedure, mean arrival routes can be determined for different runway configurations and different airports, which can facilitate the airport performance assessment.