Super Close Runway Operations (SupeRO): A New Concept to Increase Runway Capacity

Abstract

Despite the sharp drop in demand due to the COVID-19 crisis runway capacity will be a considerable bottleneck for the development of air transportation during the next decades. The construction of new runways in sufficient distance to existing ones would bring a relief but is often blocked by settlement structures in the direct vicinity of the airport. The reduction of longitudinal separations for operations on one runway is receiving strong research efforts but with limited capacity improvements. In this context we propose a new concept to substantially reduce some of the capacity limiting separations between runway operations without requiring the space to build a completely new runway.The idea is to construct and operate a second parallel runway lane as close as possible to an existing runway and to establish usage concepts to enable considerable capacity gains. The near-term usage concept is an operation in segregated mode, i.e. landing on one lane and departing on the other lane.In a first step a near term operational concept was defined and then assessed in an airport-in-the-lab scenario regarding achievable capacity benefits of up to 50 %. As the close distance operations on both runway lanes induce questions about the safety case we address the veer-off effect as one important safety aspect and develop a model to identify the induced collision risk.