Steering aircraft towards a more flexible – and green – final approach
“GALAAD will focus on achieving greater fuel efficiency and environmental sustainability without compromising capacity, safety, human performance and cost-efficiency.”
Airports and the surrounding terminal airspace are busy and congested places. “With congestion comes more flight inefficiencies, which results in significant excess fuel consumption and carbon emissions,” notes Fabio Mangiaracina, senior project manager and air traffic management (ATM) expert at ENAV, Italy’s civil air navigation service provider. As Mangiaracina explains, these inefficiencies can be either variable (e.g. air traffic operation contingencies and severe weather conditions) or the result of the airspace itself. “At least part of these inefficiencies can be attributed to the fact that most terminal areas are designed for high traffic conditions,” he says, with the management of arrivals requiring the ability to extend the approach path and absorb delays. With the support of the GALAAD project, funded through the SESAR JU, ENAV is leading an effort to address these inefficiencies. To do so, it aims to enhance the sustainability, responsiveness and adaptability of such ATM factors as traffic density, airspace availability, environmental constraints and weather conditions. “GALAAD will concentrate its efforts on enhancing operations within the terminal area airspace, with a specific focus on achieving greater fuel efficiency and environmental sustainability without compromising capacity, safety, human performance and cost-efficiency,” adds Mangiaracina.
Go with the flow
The main goal of the project is to transition ATM away from the rigid use of required navigation performance (RNP) arrival route structures towards a dynamic, more flexible approach to managing arrivals and departures. To achieve this, the GALAAD project proposes a concept that will allow RNP route structures to be activated or deactivated depending on, for example, the time of day, for noise control purposes, or traffic demand. “This will avoid the use of more complex route structures during periods of low demand, enabling agile responses to variations in such terminal area operational conditions as traffic density, airspace availability or environmental constraints,” remarks Mangiaracina. GALAAD aims to reach its goals by investigating the decision support tools needed to facilitate the dynamic use of RNP routes. Dynamic allocation of arrival route structures will allow managers to exploit different trade-offs between capacity, efficiency and environmental impact, depending on the level of traffic. “This will allow air traffic control to relax the constraints designed for high traffic conditions in lower traffic scenarios, resulting in a significant improvement in fuel and environmental performance,” concludes Mangiaracina.
Keywords
aviation, SESAR JU, sustainability, carbon neutrality, air traffic management, ATM, Green Deal, environmental impact, Horizon Europe, Digital European Sky, emissions, reduction