An Analysis of the Potential Savings from Using Formation Flight in the NAS

Inspired by the energy savings that migrating birds achieve when flying in formations, of interest is achieving a similar level of savings with aircraft flying in the National Airspace System (NAS). In particular, with typically more than 50,000 flights in the NAS on any given day, there is much clustering of aircraft so there is much potential for creating formations. Most previous research in this area has focused on analyzing aircraft in a single formation ‐ developing computational models, performing wind tunnel tests, or developing controllers for maintaining a formation ‐ but little research has been done on investigating a NAS-wide implementation of formation flight for commercial aircraft. This work leverages the corridor-in-the-sky concept from on-going aviation research to develop a model for simulating formation flight with these corridors. The results show that for the top ten corridors there are approximately 1,200 flights which can benefit from formation flight. Compared with actual flight plans the resulting annual savings is approximately $600 million and compared against flying optimal, great circle trajectories, the resulting annual savings is approximately $320 million. Finally, Monte Carlo simulation shows that these savings are robust to uncertainty and fluctuated flight schedules.