01698172

Component

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Eurocontrol publish metrics to evaluate flight horizontal en route inefficiency (HIE), which measures the excess distance flown with respect to the theoretical shortest distance route. Knowledge of the factors that drive variation in en route efficiency is, however, limited. This paper proposes an approach to relate HIE with convective weather, wind, Miles-In-Trail restrictions (MIT), Airspace Flow Programs (AFP), Monitor Alerts (MA), and Special Activity Airspace (SAA). Furthermore, the authors develop econometric models to quantify how these factors affect HIE based on a historical dataset with flights among 97 major US airport pairs in 2013. Their analysis is based on the concept of a synthetic nominal route, in thei case a great circle route, whose features are time-dependent, and are assumed to affect HIE of a given flight even though its trajectory does not follow the great circle. In the models, the authors also consider the effects of airspace route structure by inclusion of airport-pair fixed effects, and a measure of flight distance that is sensitive to the efficient placement of terminal entry and exit points. The estimation results suggest that long-haul flights are in general more efficient than short-haul flights, and inefficient terminal entry and exit points lead to greater HIE. The estimates confirm that inefficiency is greater when synthetic great circle routes have greater exposure to convective weather, unfavorable winds, MITs, SAAs, and long-delay AFPs. Finally, the authors find that MAs do not appear to have much direct impact on en route inefficiency.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AV060 Standing Committee on Airfield and Airspace Capacity and Delay.

19-03226

English

17p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Air traffic control; Aircraft operations; Airspace (Aeronautics); Econometric models; On time performance; Trip length

Miles-in-trail restrictions

Aviation; Economics; Operations and Traffic Management

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-03226

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:47AM