Report Asserts Technology Can Increase Airport Capacity

A new Reason Foundation study states that capacity could be dramatically increased at a number of America's busiest airports with new technologies that include RNP (required navigation performance), ADS-B (automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast), CDAs (continuous descent approaches), and SAMM (surface area movement management).

The Reason study, authored by Robert Poole, the foundation's director of transportation studies, and Viggo Butler, chairman of United Airports Limited, discusses ways several of these airports could expand their capacity, and improve their efficiency, without increasing their physical size, thereby avoiding costly and prolonged battles over condemning land, dealing with noise, and assuaging nearby residents.  It also details how the U.S. NextGen air traffic system can increase arrival and departure rates, reduce weather delays, and decrease noise and environmental impacts.

The report claims, for example, that a full implementation of some of these new systems would increase runway throughput at JFK by 50%, and as much as 45% at Newark Liberty. Even at New York's LaGuardia, with its non-parallel crossing runways, the report suggests some of these technologies could enable an additional throughput of 10%.

The study doesn't aver that new technology by itself will solve all capacity problems of course.  In some cases, infrastructure additions, such as new runways will be needed, but perhaps without as much difficulty as commonly believed.  At New York's Kennedy airport, Poole and Butler, suggest that a new runway between Runway's 4R and 4L could be constructed, without needing more real estate, that would have spacing similar to Boston's Logan, and greater than the current separation between the main parallel runways at San Francisco.

The extremely close proximity of San Francisco's 28L and 28R is problematic, of course, but the report maintains that even there, with a full implementation of RNP, which uses GPS and advanced FMCs (flight management computers), throughput could be increased by more than 50%. RNP's ability to allow an aircraft to fly very precise lateral and vertical paths also could allow increases in runway capacity at Oakland and San Jose airports, the report asserts.

"Recent research has shown that the combination of GPS technology and advanced cockpit displays would permit SFO's parallel runways to operate safely in low visibility conditions, with nearly the same throughput as in clear weather.  That would dramatically reduce delays at this key airport," the report says. "We have the technology to do this and it is time to implement it. Current limitations on flight paths and closely spaced runways stem from obsolete 20th-century technology. New technologies will make it quite safe to operate closely spaced parallel runways in reduced visibility conditions."

Beyond making claims for RNP, the report has a compilation of recorded evidence, much of it supplied by Naverus, of how RNP operations compare with traditional airway and terminal path navigation.

The report explores the value of other technologies and their ability to generate new procedures for improving capacity as well.  These include the use of RPAT (RNP parallel approach transition), which allows an aircraft to approach a parallel runway at an angle while its corresponding traffic flies a straight-in path; complex arrivals such as Washington D.C.'s Potomac River approach, or Juneau, Alaska, or Lhasa Tibet; and the use of multiple paths into an airport leading to a convergence on final approach with proper spacing and in the correct order.  Similar improvements can be made for departures.

ADS-B and new cockpit displays will contribute to airport capacity and efficiency improvements too, as UPS is demonstrating at Louisville. The same is true for CDAs (continuous descent approaches), which the report also discusses along with empirical data, showing how they can reduce fuel burn, the impact of noise, and time.

In addition, the report discusses how NextGen technologies could be used to optimize the use of intersecting runways, takeoffs and landings on parallel runways and the problems of conflicts with nearby airports.

The FAA's WAAS (wide area augmentation system) could help by inducing some traffic to use secondary airports more frequently, thereby relieving pressure on the major ones, the report says.

The report also addresses the problem of windshear, which for years has seemed to be an intractable obstacle to greater runway utilization.  It discusses several options, from  the use of more accurate threat assessments from laser-based systems, to novel flight procedures, such as using two glideslopes to the same or parallel runways with the help of a HALS (high approach landing system) and DTOP (dual threshold operations). Both of these are being evaluated at Frankfurt, Germany.  03-13-2008.

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