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The article describes an approach to forecast air-traffic movements at capacity-constrained airports. The tool which can easily be applied to other airports ranges from forecasting origin-destination (OD) passenger flows to generating flight schedules. It focuses on the deduction of aircraft movements out of OD figures and on the generation of flight schedules.

The frequency of aircraft encountering the wake of other aircraft is analyzed for given aircraft, movement, and meteorological data. The method considers the descent and decay of wake vortices for a given stratification and turbulence-kinetic-energy dissipation rate, and the advection with ambient horizontal and vertical wind. An encounter is characterized in this study by the distance between the position of a follower aircraft and the centerline of a wake vortex behind the vortex generator, and by the wake-induced lift forces or roll moments on the encountering aircraft. A linear model is used for an efficient identification of potential wake-vortex encounters for all flight segments in dense traffic regions. The method is applied to radar-observed traffic over North America in 46 days in 2010/2011, and validated against pilot-reported wake encounters and automated in situ turbulence reports. Most upper-level encounters are found for medium-size aircraft on nearly parallel flight routes during descent. En route encounters of wakes from heavy aircraft flying 1000 ft higher occur relatively rarely. The frequency of wake-vortex encounters increases with the square of air-traffic density. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Air traffic controller workload is considered to be a limiting factor to air traffic growth. Previous research introduced the static solution space approach to assess the difficulty of aircraft merging tasks. In this paper the dynamic, tangent-based solution space will be introduced that includes the future trajectory intent of all aircraft. Metrics derived from the solution space, together with common metrics, were tested for correlations with controller workload. An experiment has been conducted where subjects were required to line up all aircraft in a sector towards a certain waypoint, while periodically rating their workload. High correlations were found between several solution space related metrics and subjective workload ratings. In contrast to the number of aircraft metric, which had the highest correlation with workload, the dynamic solution space may allow for controller workload prediction in real-time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problem of estimating the characteristics of the air traffic flow in the terminal area is considered. The estimated parameters can be used by the traffic flow coordinators and terminal area controllers to improve their response to varying air traffic flow. The approach is based on a queuing abstraction of the arrival and departure traffic routes in the terminal area. The routes are discretized as spatial servers for enforcing Federal Aviation Administration mandated separation requirements. Particle filtering methodology is employed for estimating the time-varying queuing parameters using radar track data. By considering the waypoint crossing times and airspeed as measurements, it is shown that it is feasible to estimate the time delay and its rate at various points along the arrival/departure routes. The proposed approach is illustrated using historical radar track data. A graphic display of estimated parameters to serve as a decision-support tool for use by the terminal area traffic controllers is also illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wake-vortex hazards are a huge threat in aviation. These hazards are well accepted in the vicinity of airports (both departure and arrival). But also a number of en route incidents have happened in the past. Current wake-vortex mitigation strategies are based on static distances (in space and/or time). In future air traffic management concepts of Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research and NextGen, these static distances will be replaced by dynamic separation strategies. Furthermore, concepts for self-separation of aircraft are described. This paper will discuss the work at Technische Universität Braunschweig, where a new concept for wake-vortex hazard mitigation has been developed. The basic idea of the new concept is that only a criticality parameter will be transmitted between aircraft to ensure a safe separation even within new self-separation concepts. The criticality parameter will give an indication about the severity (and therefore criticality to the following aircraft) of the vortices. Additionally, Technische Universitat Braunschweig will install wind-turbulence measurement equipment onboard its research aircraft. This installation will be also be described, and the possible usage will be discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in arrival scheduling and controller aids for spacing have the potential benefits of reducing aircraft delays and increasing airport arrival throughput. Schedulers use fixed arrival paths to estimate aircraft's time-to-fly and assign them arrival slots based on the required separation with a buffer. Concepts that reduce arrival time uncertainty can take advantage of advanced scheduling with smaller spacing buffers. These concepts have been successfully demonstrated with a handful of near- to midterm traffic demand scenarios and technologies using spacing buffers as low as 0.3 n mile. The analysis published here characterizes the observed arrival spacing behavior of 29 runways at 15 airports in eight of the busiest terminal areas across the United States during 32-60 days worth of traffic. The typical observed instrument arrival buffers ranging from 0.5 to 1.5 n mile would equate to roughly a 10-20 % increase in runway arrival capacity if buffers were reduced to 0.3 n mile. The effect of fixed arrival routing on terminal area flight time was also studied. Most runways studied had a significant path stretch delay. This work estimates that 1-2 rain of this delay could be reduced with precision scheduling, and most of the remaining delay could be absorbed by speed control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study concerning speed adjustment and optimal scheduling for arriving airplane in en route sector. It notes that the study has seen that one of the primary problems for busy airports during rush hours is flow control. It mentions that air traffic controllers must arrange the sequence of aircraft.