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In the future air transportation system, airspace will be efficiently used and each aircraft can optimize its own performance. Due to limited capacity of the airspace like terminal area, however, some sort of adjustment for each aircraft is necessary to maintain separation among multiple aircraft.Fixed arrival time is a basic solution to the problem. This paper studies the effect of arrival time assignment on the performance by assuming that each aircraft generates its own flight plan by minimizing its fuel consumption. Dynamic programming trajectory optimization is used to calculate the optimal flight profile composed of altitude and velocity. The result shows that the arrival time adjustment is efficiently performed in the descent phase, if the required amount of time to be adjusted is not large.

Fuel-efficient flight is in strong demand due to environmental concerns and skyrocketing fuel prices. This paper analyzes airliner flight trajectory from the perspective of fuel efficiency through comparison with the optimal trajectory. Since the optimal trajectory gives the maximum achievable performance without any constraint of air traffic control, it introduces reference data for quantitative merit of the ideal flight. Dynamic programming is adopted to calculate the optimal trajectory. Examples show that considerable reduction in the fuel consumption from the estimated values for actual flights could be achieved by the trajectory optimization, where wind conditions are taken into account as well.