Evaluating of the benefits of allowing flight level and mach number adjustment for fuel efficiency for flight operations in oceanic airspace

Satellite-based technologies (e.g., Automatic Dependent Surveillance (ADS) - Contract and space-based ADS - Broadcast) have been introduced to improve the surveillance and communication over the airspace in remote areas. In this paper, we evaluated two improvements that could improve the flight operations in remote oceanic airspace. The first one is to allow more step climbs for fuel efficiency. The second one is to allow Mach number adjustment for fuel efficiency. We believe that both of them could be enabled by satellite-based surveillance and communication technologies. A microscopic simulation model is developed to evaluate the benefits of the two improvements in terms of fuel and time consumptions. We evaluated the benefits of three possible implementations of the two improvements (i.e., allow step climbs only, allow Mach number adjustment only, and the combination of the two) for flight operations in the oceanic airspace (i.e., ZNY) managed by New York air traffic control centers.