Abstract

The Circular Runway proposes a novel and radical design for a runway, a circular track, circumventing the airport. This runway is used for take-off in any direction and landing from any direction, thus offering the unique characteristic that the runway can be used under any wind condition through the possibility for an aircraft to operate always with headwind during take-off and landing. Moreover, it will allow aircraft to shorten their global trajectory through optimised departure and arrival routes and avoid runway crossings overruns. The airport terminals with all aircraft, passenger, baggage and freight facilities will be located mainly inside the circular runway. The Circular Runway offers a sustainable airport that will allow operations in all directions independent of the wind. The total area of land use of the airport is smaller than that of an airport with straight runways and a similar number of movements. In order to tackle the airport network capacity limitation and the efficiency requirement, an alternative design to current airports is proposed: a circular runway concept. The main underlying idea is to operate the runway in any direction safely whatever the wind direction, with any aircraft category, including those with long take-off and landing rolls.

The circular runway concept also aims at eliminating any problems faced during landing and take off like crosswinds, tailwinds, adverse weather conditions with its unique design and provides ease of operations for pilots and ground crew alike with effective communication and working strategies.

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL

From the Air Traffic Management (ATM) perspective, the circular runway will be split in segments. An aircraft will use a set of contiguous runway segments for take-off and landing, and several aircraft will be authorised to use distinct runway strips simultaneously. With a high number of segments, flexibility will be increased as the required runway strip can be optimised based on the required landing and take-off distances. with a low number of segments, unnecessary parts of the runway might be blocked.On the other hand, a high number of segments lead to more infrastructural, coordination and calculation needs.

IDEA of traffic control:

The circular runway is divided into various segments, each with its own geographic coordinates which can be defined in the flight control database using appropriate data structures.

When a pilot asks for permission to land, after automatic authentication, the system evaluates various physical parameters like crosswinds, tailwind, temperature, weight, size and speed of the aircraft and evaluates optimal strategies for landing that include the angle of landing, speed of approach and guides the pilots throughout the landing through the pilot information system for a safe and effective landing.

The pilot information system simultaneous effectively manages three or four planes through efficient strategies to manage traffic at three or four parts of the runway by effectively communicating with the pilots of each plane. The system automatically breaks the circular runway into segments and effectively manages four planes simultaneously on the same runway.