Evaluation of noise abatement approach procedures

Abstract

The air traffic has been consistently growing up for many past years and the trend is always to be continued. Since the air traffic has been deregulated at many places in the world, the flight number records have raised hugely. Above all the development of “hubs and spokes” airline networks has been generating high traffic levels or high traffic peaks at many large airports in the United States or in Europe. At many airports, the runways and the arrival and departure flight paths have a large impact on the people living and moving around airports, who become especially irritated by the air traffic. While bigger airplane capacity is today being offered to the airlines, one common trend is at increasing the frequencies with smaller aircraft, so that the congestion of air traffic at large airports is amplified and generates even more noise for the environment. Moreover, this can conduct to waiting time around the airports for the arriving flights, what means noisy areas. Thanks to large efforts conducted both by the airplanes manufacturers and engine companies, the noise emitting from an aircraft has significantly fell down over the past thirty years, so that a further reduction of the engine noise will not solve the noise problem significantly. For this reason it is now essential to find, develop and generalize new noise abatement procedures. These procedures have to minimize the noise impact on the ground and on the populated areas, while assuring that the safety level and the airports capacity are not going to decrease. Several noise abatement procedures have been elaborated and locally tested and applied; they have allowed an important noise decline or a locally retarded noise annoyance. Yet some of these abatement procedures can only be applied at particular day periods, i.e. by night, because they limit the arrival and departure rates. Other procedures also overload the charge of air controllers, or may be seen as unsafe by pilots. In order to answer these questions it is essential to elaborate a concept that allow, with a chosen noise abatement procedure, the control of the required separation time and distance and regard the airport capacity. In line with this study, the work will deal with the optimization of the airport capacity by approaches, and more particularly with the Continuous Descent Approach (CDA) procedure. The construction of a computer concept will therefore be presented and used to determine the parameters allowing an optimization research on the airport capacity with a CDA.