Arrival-Time Controllability of Tailored Arrival Subjected to Flight-Path Constraints

摘要

Recently, the continuous descent approach has been strongly focused because it can drastically reduce noisenemission and fuel consumption during approach. The tailored arrival is proposed to facilitate the continuous descentnapproach at congested terminal airspace. In a tailored arrival operation, each arriving aircraft is provided with anspecifically designed arrival path to fly on a continuous descent approach path without any conflict with othernaircraft. In this paper, the arrival-time controllability of the tailored arrival paths determined by the top-of-descentnand waypoint positions are discussed. A tailored arrival path is designed using the least number of track-to-fix andnradius-to-fix legs neglecting the engine thrust. Two types of tailored arrival path are numerically investigated; one isndetermined by adjusting the waypoint positions with the fixed top of descent, and the other is determined by top-of-ndescent position with the fixed waypoints. They are numerically analyzed so as to satisfy a set of appropriatenboundary conditions both at the top of descent and landing, and the behavior of the arrival-time difference fromthenstandard continuous descent approach path is explored using a representative set of inputs. The arrival-timencontrollability is defined as the differences between the fastest and the slowest arrival time. Through several series ofnarrival-time analyses, it is found that the tailored arrival paths determined by changing the waypoint positions cannachieve the larger arrival-time controllability compared with those determined by changing the top-of-descentnposition. It is also suggested that it is possible to compose an arrival path with the maximum arrival-timencontrollability without any additional fuel consumption.