Joint Strategic and Tactical Air Traffic Management of Arrival Flights at Tokyo International Airport for Reduced Climate Impact

Enhanced information sharing and data downlink between onboard and ground-based systems can significantly improve flight trajectory predictability. This can be utilized to control the demand/capacity balance at peak hours, when airborne delays tend to increase, thus leading to extra fuel burn which worsens aviation’s carbon footprint. Metering, achieved mainly through speed control to sequence and space the aircraft in the terminal area, can absorb some of the airborne delay which would otherwise be absorbed through vectoring only. The authors argue that further benefits can be achieved when such tactical metering is coupled with optimal strategic air traffic flow management (ATFM), such as ground delay programs (GDP). This research considers joint strategic and tactical ATFM measures to improve traffic efficiency and reduce climate impact without negatively impacting arrival delays. A traffic simulation of Tokyo International (Haneda) Airport arrivals is developed based on real traffic data. Airborne delay can be absorbed through metering (deceleration mainly in the enroute and early descent portions of the flight), point-merge-system (PMS) trajectory extensions, and vectoring when necessary. Strategic control is executed through GDP. The main control parameter of the GDP is the buffer, or the maximum allowed airborne delay. No ground delay is assigned unless the projected delay exceeds this buffer. Results show that increasing the buffer decreases the ground delay but increases all 3 airborne delays. Two spacing strategies are evaluated and the effect of pop-up flights is discussed. A combination of GDP and metering can alleviate some of the vectoring. Considering the relatively lower cost of ground delays versus airborne delays, the authors propose low GDP control buffer values for reduced fuel burn and environmental impact.