project E

Feeders-to-Entry Points Assignment in Stockholm Terminal Airspace

Background

Air transportation experienced significant growth over the last decades, and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) projected that the number of passengers will double to reach 7 billion/year by 2034. On the one hand, this reflects a healthy economic and technological development, on the other hand, the increased volume of air traffic poses many challenges. The Terminal Maneuvring Area (TMA), i.e., the area surrounding one or more neighboring aerodromes, is particularly affected by congestion (e.g., as few as 80 movements/hr already lead to high capacity needs in a Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA), while as many as 160 movements/hr create only medium capacity needs enroute [ (SESAR, 2012), p. 20]).

The Stockholm Terminal Maneuvring Area (S-TMA) serves two major airports: Arlanda, with three runways and ca. 200000 aircraft movements per year, and Bromma, with one runway and ca. 30000 movements per year. Arlanda is the largest Swedish airport and a hub for the national carrier SAS. In addition, there are three small airfileds inside the TMA, that partly contribute to the complex traffic situation.

Similar to most airports around the world, today’s S-TMA configuration is the legacy of a historical development, when expert opinion and rules-of-thumb were used to establish the existing procedures. This also includes the transition into the TMA: aircraft entering/leaving the TMA are assigned so called entry/exit points, the first/last point in the TMA after/before leaving/entering an adjacent sector. The question is how the assignment of these points to flights influences the distance flown by aircraft:

Waypoints

Every flight (plan) is a sequence of waypoints. Some points have names (called named points), while the others are special points (their names start from special characters).

Entries and feeders

For every flight there exists an entry point to the TMA. When following the flight segments back towards the origin, one can determine the previous named point of the flight (excluding the special points). We call this named point that precedes the entry point, the feeder point of the flight, or simply the feeder.

Project goal

The aim of the project is to determine the optimal entry point for each flight, i.e., the entry point, flying through which would result in the shortest distance flown from the feeder via the entry point to the runway. This distance should be compared to the actual distance flown from the feeder.

The distances between feeders and entry points are the great circle distances (GCDs).

The distance from the entry points to the runways are the distances along the Standard Arrival Routes (STARs). PDFs with the STARs for Arlanda can be found here: https://www.aro.lfv.se/Editorial/View/IAIP?folderId=55 . Consider only the flights that landed on RWY26. Calculate the distances along the STARs from each entry point. NB: the STARs are "open" -- they run only to the initial approach fixes (IAFs); the distance flown from each IAF to the runway is GCD.

Flight data

The historical flights data for the year 2014 from EUROCONTROL’s DDR2 repository (file 201401010000_201412312359__ESSA___m1.so6) can be found in the student drive, directory TN/FL/TNFL09. See description of so6 format in DDR2_Manual_101.pdf in the same directory.

Project group

This project is run by the whole class. The task distribution is determined in the distributed manner by the students themselves; help from the lecturers is requested as needed.