With the development of aircraft equipment, conventional navigation shifted towards performance-based navigation (PBN) procedures, which significantly improved the efficiency of airport arrivals. Availability of the open-access Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) data enables research targeting careful and detailed analysis of the arrival performance. In this work, we demonstrate how we use historical data provided via Opensky Network to investigate various aspects of arrival performance at three European airports implementing different sequencing and merging techniques (Dublin, Stockholm-Arlanda, and Vienna). We create a number of datasets of different size and features, and apply a set of performance metrics characterizing horizontal and vertical efficiency, sequencing and metering effort, as well as environmental efficiency at the chosen airports.

The ability to comprehensively evaluate the performance inside Terminal Maneuvering Area (TMA) is important for understanding of the traffic conditions in the airport vicinity, and to identify the areas for possible improvements. We examine performance of the individual arrival flows to Göteborg Landvetter airport and analyze them separately in order to identify the problematic areas. Then, we test the potential of introducing Point Merge (PM) arrival procedure to this airport and schedule aircraft arrivals along them. We aim to determine whether introducing the PM structure improves the arrival performance and analyze the associated trade-offs. Comparing the resulting performance of the optimally-scheduled arrivals with PM against the baseline scenario derived from the historical flight trajectories obtained from the open-source Opensky Network database, we observe that adherence to the PM procedures provides a decrease in the fuel consumption about 5% in average due to improved vertical efficiency, however the time and distance aircraft spend in TMA increased both 10.4%. PM usage provides additional benefits in terms of improved controllability of the traffic flows, supported by significant reduction in the spacing deviation within the control area close to the runway.

The aviation industry faces the urgent challenge of reconciling projected traffic growth with stringent climate targets, including the European Union’s goal of climate neutrality by 2050. While tec ...

Exposure to high levels of noise negatively affects human health. The noise produced by aircraft engines is strong enough to reach well beyond the limits suggested by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and it is estimated that the health and well-being of millions of people in Europe is impaired by aircraft noise. In this work, we estimate the potential benefits from performing a continuous descent operation (CDO) in the terminal maneuvering area (TMA), by comparing the noise and emissions calculated for the actual aircraft trajectories, obtained from the OpenSky network database, to a more efficient descent, where the engines are running at idle thrust. To model the aircraft performance, we use the Base of Aircraft Data (BADA), while IMPACT is used for calculating noise and emissions. We consider three European airports (Stockholm-Arlanda, Vienna and Dublin) focusing on the busy periods in 2019 and the most used arrival runways at each airport. Even though the highest levels of noise are experienced during take-off and the the initial climb-phase, where aircraft engines are operating at a high thrust setting, as well as during the final approach segment, where aircraft are closer to the ground, the results of our study suggest that noise-related benefits may also be obtained for areas further away from an airport when arriving aircraft perform CDOs. Additionally, we observe that while most of the emissions decrease when aircraft perform CDOs, some components, such as carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrocarbon (HC) may also increase.