No abstract

In the United States, over 2,400 of the 2,941 non-primary National Plan of Integrated Airport System airports have limited means of establishing operations counts due to lack of available personnel. Precise counts of airport operations are helpful for allocating airport improvement funds, as well as for local and system planning. An emerging technology utilizing ADS-B position data to calibrate signal strength received from Mode C transponders, thereby capturing location information from over 90% of the aircraft operating in the National Airspace System, has successfully estimated operations counts at these non-towered airports with reasonable levels of accuracy. This paper evaluates the impact of further calibration of the model using an atmospheric pressure-based calibration method to improve the accuracy of operations counts. Over 10 million aircraft transponder records collected during 58 days at Purdue University Airport and Terre Haute Regional Airport were analyzed. Uncorrected operations counts and corrected counts using atmospheric pressures averaged both monthly and daily were compared with those obtained from tower-reported figures from the Air Traffic Activity Data System (ATADS) database. The overall accuracy of operations counts from uncorrected heuristics ranged from 5.5% to 13.6% as compared to ATADS over different time periods ranging from 55 to 58 days. Incorporating monthly and daily average pressures improved the count accuracy from 3.2% to 8.7% and from 2.6% to 9.3%, respectively. The test results suggest that the barometric correction method using monthly average pressures results in a modest improvement in overall percentage error and mean average error over the uncorrected method.

Accurate airport operations counts are important for determining appropriate funding allocations for airport development and improvement. Fewer than 270 of the 2,950 non-primary airports in the United States, however, have air traffic control (ATC) personnel who are available to count airport operations. Existing counting methods such as automatic acoustic counters (AAC) are not viable long-term solutions because of the expense and inconvenience of deploying the devices on a large scale. This paper validates a cost-effective counting technology based on a technique that uses signal strength obtained from aircraft transponders to register the occurrence of aircraft operations at non-towered airports. Over 50 million transponder records were collected from two different versions of the system, which were installed at Purdue University Airport (KLAF), Terre Haute Regional Airport (KHUF), and Indianapolis Executive Airport (KTYQ), all in Indiana. The operations counts calculated from these records were compared with those obtained from the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA)’s Air Traffic Activity Data System (ATADS) database, which contains official operations data reported by airports with ATC towers. The Version I device utilized a Raspberry Pi platform and produced error rates ranging from −10.2% to +7.6%. The Version II device consisted of the pre-production commercialized system and resulted in error rates ranging from −4.9% to −1.4%. The test results suggest that this pre-production implementation of the transponder signal-counting technology is an accurate and cost-effective way to count non-towered airport operations. Improvement and testing of this technology is being undertaken, and field deployments are ongoing at additional airports.

No abstract

Aircraft noise is considered as one of the environmental impacts that most adversely affects airport development. Aircraft noise estimation tools such as the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT) are widely used by airports to mitigate local concerns for airport development. Aircraft operations and fleet mix information play important roles in aircraft performance modeling for noise prediction. However, such information is difficult to obtain at almost 85% of the 3,348 National Plan of Integrated Airport Systems (NPIAS) airports, which lack full-time air traffic control facilities and personnel. Given the increasing percentage of equipped automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) aircraft in the U.S. national airspace, this paper presents a cost-effective noise estimation approach for non-towered general aviation (GA) airports. Instead of deploying physical sound meters or relying on the local air traffic control facilities, the authors collected aircraft positional data and fleet mix information based on ADS-B broadcasts. Advanced aircraft performance model parameters are constructed using four-dimensional aircraft position and a kinematic point-mass model. Aircraft-specific noise levels are interpolated based on the EUROCONTROL Aircraft Noise and Performance (ANP) database. To obtain the final noise level, two adjustments are applied to the interpolated noise values. The test results show the proposed approach can help non-towered airports predict the noise impact on any selected locations near the airport cost-effectively. Recommendations and opportunities for future investigation are also included.