Estimation of airline benefits from avionics upgrade under preferential merge re-sequence scheduling

Abstract

Modernization of the airline fleet avionics is essential to fully enable future technologies and procedures for increasing national airspace system capacity. However in the current national airspace system, system-wide benefits gained by avionics upgrade are not fully returned to aircraft/airlines that upgrade, resulting in a slow fleet modernization rate. Preferential merging is a best-equipped-best-served concept designed to incentivize avionics upgrade among airlines by allowing aircraft with new avionics (high-equipped) to be resequenced ahead of aircraft without the upgrades (low-equipped) at en-route merge waypoints. The goal of this study is to investigate the potential benefits gained by airlines under a high or low-equipped fleet scenario if preferential merging is implemented, using historical data for arrival flights into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.

Incentivizing Aircraft Equipment Upgrade Through Preferential Merging: A Phoenix Case Study

“…A companion paper to this study investigates the same question, but from an economic perspective, performing a financial analysis on the operational benefits created by Preferential Merging. 8 The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II describes the approach to simulating Preferential Merging in the airspace including the data and methods used.…”

“…Since very few flights actually passed through the exact location of the merge fix, the value of 3.5 miles was determined by visual inspection of the flight paths. 8 Determining whether two flights were on the same horizontal track was also necessary. To determine this, flights with heading differences of less than 7 degrees or more were considered to be on the same track.…”

“…To determine this, flights with heading differences of less than 7 degrees or more were considered to be on the same track. 8 For scheduling arrivals to meet airport arrival constraints, real-world airport capacities were collected from Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) data, which contain hourly departure and arrival rates for 77 of the major U.S. airports. 10…”

“…In this process, the scheduler accounts for minimum vortex separation constraints, which are on the order of 50 to 140 seconds depending on the size and ordering of the two aircraft. 8 If the current flight being scheduled has been designated as high-equipped, the scheduler attempts to let it pass any previously scheduled low-equipped aircraft in the arrival queue.…”

“…Speeding up of high-equipped aircraft is limited to the max cruise speed obtained from the aircraft manufacturer's specifications. 8 For flights passing through a single merge fix, the period for which the speed is adjusted begins at top-of-climb and ends at the target merge-fix or at top-of-descent depending on which occurs first. Flights passing through multiple merge-fixes follow the same procedure except that the previous merge-fix is the starting point of the speed adjustment period.…”