An Exploratory Study of Runway Arrival Procedures: Time Based Arrival and Self-Spacing

The ability of a flight crew to deliver their aircraft to its arrival runwa y on time is important to the overall efficiency of the National Airspace System (NAS). Over the past several years, the NAS has been stressed almost to its limits resulting in problems such as airport congestion, flight delay, and flight cancellation to r each levels that have never been seen before in the NAS. It is predicted that this situation will worsen by the year 2025, due to an anticipated increase in air traffic operations to one -and-a-half to three times its current level. Improved arrival efficie ncy, in terms of both capacity and environmental impact, is an important part of improving NAS operations. One way to improve the arrival performance of an aircraft is to enable the flight crew to precisely deliver their aircraft to a specified point at either a specified time or specified interval relative to another aircraft. This gives the flight crew more control to make the necessary adjustments to their aircraft’s performance with less tactical control from the controller; it may also decrease the con troller’s workload. Two approaches to precise time navigation have been proposed: Time -Based Arrivals (e.g., required times of arrival) and Self -Spacing. Time-Based Arrivals make use of an aircraft’s Flight Management System (FMS) to deliver the aircraft t o the runway threshold at a given time. Self-Spacing enables the flight crew to achieve an ATC assigned spacing goals at the runway threshold relative to another aircraft. The Joint Planning and Development Office (JPDO), a multi-agency initiative established to plan and coordinate the development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen), has asked for data for both of these concepts to facilitate future research and development. This paper provides a first look at the delivery performance of these two concepts under various initial and environmental conditions in an air traffic simulation environment.

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