A Safety Concept Paving the Way Towards Segmented Independent Parallel Approaches

Abstract

Although air traffic’s growth rate has slowed in the U.S. and Europe, a significant rise is forecasted for upcoming decades. This increases the pressure on airport operators and air navigation service providers to find new ways of reducing noise levels in the vicinity of airports without adversely influencing airport capacity. Especially for airports in densely populated areas, the implementation of curved or segmented approach procedures is promising. Considering an approach scenario at which aircraft approaching into one runway inevitably overfly a noise sensitive area an alternative segmented routing that guides aircraft around these areas is advantageous. From a capacity perspective, independent runway operations are desirable and capacity-beneficial for airports with a parallel runway system. Nowadays, those independent runway operations, however, can be conducted only by utilizing straight precision approaches. Consequently, segmented approach procedures are not covered by current guidelines and have strong adverse effects on capacity as they do not allow independent runway operations. This would imply that if the noise beneficial segmented routing is utilized, the runway system could no longer be operated independently thus decreasing its capacity substantially. To tackle this issue, a concept is presented in this article to help pave the way towards capacity and noise-beneficial segmented independent parallel approach procedures.