Analysis of Achievable Airborne Delay and Compliance Rate by Speed Control: A Case Study of International Arrivals at Tokyo International Airport

Abstract

Metering air traffic requires aircraft to delay their fly-over time at designated enroute fixes. This paper presents an analysis of achievable airborne delays by speed control. To ease real-world implementation, current practices set the same achievable airborne delay to all flights flying the same airway, instead of customizing the achievable delay for each flight. Using past actual radar track and flight data, the achievable delay and its potential compliance rate are analyzed statistically through illustrative numerical simulations for the international arrivals at the Tokyo International Airport. In addition, the potential benefits of fuel savings by speed control are also investigated. Simulation results indicate that 2-4 min delays per 30 min flight time are achievable on average with high compliance rate and 2-3% fuel savings are potentially expected by speed control despite the flight time increase. The analysis conducted allows decision makers to set appropriate achievable airborne delay values to each airway for real operations.

Keywords

• Air traffic control
• air traffic flow management
• air transportation
• calculated time over
• speed control
• trajectory-based operations