Potential Analysis for Simultaneous Formation Flight Departures

Abstract

The climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of today with aviation being one of the major contributors. It is, therefore, essential to decrease the climate impact of aviation by technical and operational means. One promising operational procedure to significantly reduce the fuel consumption and thus the emissions of an aircraft is the fuel-saving formation flight that is also called aircraft wake-surfing for efficiency (AWSE). However, the coordination of formation build-up for aircraft originating from different airports can be challenging due to timing and routing issues. Two formation partners departing from the same airport in contrast can be expected to achieve substantial benefits as the joint flight time can be maximized and detours can be minimized. Therefore, within this paper potential two-aircraft formation candidates scheduled for departure from the same airport within a certain time interval will be identified by means of filtering an existing global flight schedule. Based on these data the potential of an airport to conduct simultaneous formation flight departures will be assessed. Furthermore, it will be analyzed how this potential changes if time offsets between the departures of the formation members are accepted. In addition, the fuel-saving benefits of the identified formations will be estimated by modeling the formation routes and by assessment with advanced surrogate models. It will be shown that, although today’s flight schedules are not optimized for AWSE, a potential for simultaneous departures especially at the big hub airports exists that can lead to substantial fuel savings.