Flight Testing of Automated Closely Spaced Parallel Approaches

Abstract

As the international air traffic increases and becomes more and more complex there is a growing demand for new operational procedures. Especially the runway capacity is a limiting factor for the maximum number of flights that can be conducted on an airport. Airports with a dependent parallel runway system can’t exploit the full potential of the individual capacity of a single runway as approaching aircraft have to maintain an increased separation due to the threat of wake vortices. In this work an automated approach procedure was flight tested. The procedure aims to increase the capacity of a dependent parallel runway system. Based on the visual procedure used at San Francisco airport one aircraft (the “leading” aircraft) is flying a standard approach procedure (i.e. RNAV or ILS) with certain time constraints while a second aircraft (the “trailing” aircraft) is flying a parallel approach that leads to a merge point at which the two aircraft are flying nearly parallel with approximately 10 seconds separation.