Economic impact of level-altitude flight segments

Real-time data from ground-based surveillance systems form the basis for current air traffic control procedures in the terminal and en route regions of today's National Airspace (NAS). Current air traffic control procedures, used by controllers, employ tactical methods to manage the separating and sequencing of aircraft. Crossing restrictions are a commonly-used component of tactical control. The use of crossing restrictions causes sub-optimal, level-altitude flight segments for extended distances, which results in excess fuel burn, excess flight duration, and higher airline operating costs. Design and use of uninterrupted climb and descent profiles will recover the lost operating costs. This work employed flight track data and a heuristic algorithm to estimate the magnitude of the lost operation costs. We estimated the impact of level-altitude flights on aircraft operating at airports in the New York City (NYC) area (e.g., EWR, JFK, LGA Airports) for Fiscal Year (FY) 2015. In FY2015, 200,000 minutes (3,333 hrs) and 10 million kg (3.3 M gal) fuel were lost due to use of level-altitude procedures for aircraft operations at the NYC-area airports. The study provides estimates of the burden of level-altitude flight sections for aircraft that operated in FY2015 at other major terminal radar approach control (TRACON) facilities in the US: Atlanta (A80), Charlotte (CLT), Chicago (C90), Dallas-Ft Worth (D10), and Northern California (NCT). For the TRACONS studied in this work, the estimated penalty of level-altitude operations is 930,000 minutes (15,500 hrs) and 61 million kg (20 M gal) fuel per year.