Trawl-Net Technology for Timely Precise Air Traffic Controller Turn-To-Base Commands

Abstract

With a transition to a time-based flight guidance approach, timely precise flight guidance of aircraft will become more important in the future than today. Amongst others, air traffic controllers will have to integrate several arrival streams of aircraft with different equipage. On the one hand there are conventional equipped aircraft which are common today. On the other hand more and more aircraft will have advanced four-dimensional flight management system (A-FMS) available onboard. To stagger conventional aircraft against equipped ones which have negotiated overflight times at significant waypoints, time critical maneuvers exist. This is particularly applicable to downwind, centerline, and final. One example is the aircraft’s turn from downwind onto the centerline where each second delay in the first direction is doubled in the other one on the centerline. This paper describes our trawl-net technology that supports air traffic controllers in giving timely precise turn-to-base commands to pilots. The trawl-net technology provides for every aircraft in the vicinity of the downwind a line of optimal turn points displayed on the human machine interface (HMI). Thus the mechanism also works for aircraft flying parallel to the downwind and complement controller assistance systems like AMAN advisories or visual aircraft spacing tools.