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 flyover 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. INDEX TERMS Air traffic control, air traffic flow management, air transportation, calculated time over, speed control, trajectory-based operations.

Data-Driven Analysis for Calculated Time Over in Air Traffic Flow Management

“…How-ever, the above previous studies employed simple model for the CTO operation; for example, all the aircraft can make 2 minutes enroute delay. Matsuno and Andreeva-Mori developed a model-based approach to estimate the compliance rate of each flight [19]. They simulated the CTO flights based on Base of Aircraft Data provided by EUROCON-TROL and calculated the key achievable delay parameter used to estimate the compliance rate.…”

Implementation of a Long-Range Air Traffic Flow Management for the Asia-Pacific Region

“…Thus, speed reductions up to 12% are feasible without additional fuel cost compared to the initially planned cruise speed [73]. When speed adjustments take place, time shifts up to 2-3 minutes per 30 minutes flight time are observed [74]. Aircraft speed could be set between optimal cruise speed and minimum fuel consumption, and speed control may affect the fuel consumption of the aircraft (maximum speed reduction during cruise phase is around the 7% [75]).…”

“…This results from different infrastructural conditions (FIR structure) and the traffic load in the respective regions. A simulation of international arrival flights from westward (East Asia and Southeast Asia) to Tokyo Haneda indicates a possible time shift of up to 8 minutes during the cruise phase due to speed adjustments [74].…”

How do airlines cut fuel usage, reducing their carbon emissions?

“…8 Aircraft fuel consumption as a function of speed takes a parabolic form, as seen in Aktürk, Atamtürk and Gürel (2014) and Matsuno and Andreeva-Mori (2020), with consumption rising beyond the Maximum Range Cruise speed (MRC). See also Boeing (2017) as well as Moskwa (2008) for media coverage of aircraft speeds.…”