Hypothetical Redesign of the New York Metro Airspace (New Vehicle NRA)

In the NASA Research Announcement (NRA) project entitled \Advanced Vehicle Concepts and Implications for NextGen" we study how the air tra c management (ATM) system might be impacted by the introduction of novel vehicle classes. An integral part of this e ort is the redesign of airspace and ight procedures to accommodate these vehicles and thereby minimize environmental impacts and fuel burn while at the same time, maintain airport and airspace capacity. The New York Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON) otherwise known as N90 was selected for this exercise. In order to undertake this study, we assume the major NextGen concepts and technologies are in place enabling aircraft to be routed and own more precisely and along complex routes than those being own today. Airports in the vicinity of New York City are extremely congested. John F. Kennedy International (JFK), Newark International (EWR), LaGuardia (LGA) and Teterboro (TEB) airports are some of the busiest in the United States, with JFK, EWR and LGA ranking 12th, 14th and 18th respectively in 2007 in terms of number of takeo s and landings by air carriers, air taxis, general aviation and military aircraft. These four airports may be circumscribed by a circle that is 20 NM in diameter, leading to high levels of congestion and with tra c numbers set to grow along with the introduction of new vehicles, an entire re-design of the airspace and its procedures is necessary. This re-design e ort also includes the following airports in the New York metropolitan area: Stewart International (Newburgh), Long Island Mac Arthur (Islip), Westchester County (White Plains), and Republic (Farmingdale). When all of these airports are in operation, the multiple runway usage leads to interactions between the various ows of tra c arriving and departing each airport. An image of the current procedures into the afore mentioned airports can be seen in Figure 1. Many of the airports share the same procedures, while there are numerous intersecting tracks resulting in coupling between the procedures. Unlike the procedures proposed for this re-design, almost all aircraft are vectored onto the nal approach to their landing runways while the redesigned airspace features a grid-like layout and all aircraft have set paths to and from landing and departing runways. As tra c increases at the satellite airports, these interactions will become more numerous leading to increased congestion in the airspace. This paper describes the principles used in the design of the procedures that have been created for the new vehicles being studied. These include: present aircraft (referred to as ’nominal aircraft’ in this paper), Cruise-e cient short takeo and landing transports (CESTOL), large civil tiltrotor (LCTR), very light jets (VLJ) and large supersonic transport (LSST) aircraft.