The expected growth in air traffic combined with an increased public concern for the
environment, have forced legislators to rethink the current air traffic system design. The
current air traffic system operates at its capacity limits and is expected to lead to increased
delays if traffic levels grow even further. Both in the United States and Europe, research
projects have been initiated to develop the future Air Transportation System (ATS) to
address capacity, and environmental, safety and economic issues. To address the
environmental issues during descent and approach, a novel Continuous Descent Operations
(CDO) concept, named Time and Energy Managed Operations (TEMO), has been
developed co-sponsored by the Clean Sky Joint Undertaking. It uses energy principles to
reduce fuel burn, gaseous emissions and noise nuisance whilst maintaining runway capacity.
Different from other CDO concepts, TEMO optimizes the descent by using energy
management to achieve a continuous engine-idle descent, while satisfying time constraints
on both the Initial Approach Fix (IAF) and the runway threshold. As such, TEMO uses timemetering
at two control points to facilitate flow management and arrival spacing.
TEMO is in line with SESAR step 2 capabilities, since it proposes 4D trajectory
management and is aimed at providing significant environmental benefits in the arrival phase
without negatively affecting throughput, even in high density and peak-hour operations. In
particular, TEMO addresses SESAR operational improvement (OI) TS-103: Controlled Time
of Arrival (CTA) through use of datalink [1].
TEMO has been validated starting from initial performance batch studies at Technology
Readiness Level (TRL) 3, up to Human-in-the-Loop studies in realistic environments using a
moving base flight simulator at TRL 5 ([2]-[6]).
In this paper the definition, preparation, performance and analysis of a flight test
experiment is described with the objective to demonstrate the ability of the TEMO algorithm
to provide accurate and safe aircraft guidance toward the Initial Approach Fix (IAF), and
further down to the Stabilization Point (1000 ft AGL), to demonstrate the ability of the TEMO
algorithm to meet absolute time requirements at IAF and/or runway threshold and to evaluate
the performance of the system under test (e.g. fuel usage).
