Publications

Air traffic delay grows each year. NASA is developing the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST) to help reduce airport arrival delays. FAST is intended to increase throughput and reduce delays. Analysis and field trials have suggested that FAST can help controllers increase arrival throughput on busy runways by several aircraft per hour. Published simulation studies have predicted that delay reductions from such throughput increases would save several hundred million dollars annually. However, these predictions disagree on delay savings for some airports and omit other airports of interest. Their predicted delay savings for some airports are higher than actual reported delays for those airports. They do not consider hazardous weather disruptions to arrival routes, and they do not address downstream delays caused by schedule disruption. This paper focuses on simple statistical and analytical measures of delay to resolve these problems. It develops a rule for ranking benefits and compares delay reduction predictions against actual reported delays. It relates delay to ceiling and visibility and thunderstorms. It examines the correlation of delay between airports and estimates the impact of downstream delay on FAST benefits.

The air transportation system faces a challenge in accommodating growing air traffic despite an inability to build new runways at most major airports. One approach to alleviating congestion is to find ways of using each available runway to the maximum extent possible without violating safety standards. Some decision support tools, such as the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST) that is a part of the Center TRACON Automation System (CTAS), are specifically targeted toward achieving greater runway throughput by reducing the average landing time interval (LTI) between arrivals at a given runway. In order to understand the potential benefits of such innovations, techniques for detecting spacing inefficiencies and estimating potential throughput improvements are needed. This paper demonstrates techniques for analyzing radar data from actual airport operations and using it to validate, calibrate, and extend analyzes of the FAST benefits mechanisms. The emphasis is upon robust statistical measures that can be produced through automated analysis of radar data, thus enabling large amounts of data to be analyzed.