The continuous increase of traffic demand has complicated greatly the task of air traffic controllers (ATCs), especially when managing inbound and outbound traffic flows in the vicinity of airports. Handling the flow of aircraft, ensuring safe take-offs and landings, and coordinating arrivals and departures require split-second decision-making and precision. Furthermore, ATCs play an important role in maintaining the efficiency of flight operations.
One of the phenomena that can affect flight efficiency in the context of arrival sequencing is the occurrence of pop-up flights. The expected departure time of these flights are not accurate when the arrival sequence is fixed. In such situations, ATCs still need to insert these flights into the arrival traffic flow, a task which is not straightforward, especially in dense-traffic scenarios. As a result, ATCs usually issue vector instructions to both pop-up flights and those flights already in the arrival flow. In general, this is the strategy applied for metering air traffic, thus, establishing the new arrival sequence, in which a safe separation between flights is ensured.
Although the use of vector instructions allows ATCs to keep the safety of the operation, this comes at the expense of a reduction of flight efficiency. Flights are forced to divert from the initially planned route, which involves recomputing the planned trajectory. Apart from an increase in the flight distance, these new diversion routes might involve flying at non-optimal cruise levels or, if the descent was already initiated, the use of additional thrust with the consequent increase in fuel consumption. In this work, we focus on flight operations in Japan. Currently, no initiatives have been applied yet to handle pop-up flights, which means that most of the time ATCs issue vector instructions in order to establish the arrival sequence. We focus in the case in which pop-up flights need to be scheduled into the arrival stream of a terminal maneuvering area (TMA)-metered airport. The aim of this work is to characterize the current situation in the Japanese airspace, and determine whether it is possible to establish an arrival sequence minimizing the use of vectoring to the greatest possible extent. We assess the effect on the arrival sequence for a
series of pop-up flights from Kansai International Airport to Tokyo International Airport. We prove that, even if some uncertainty is considered in the departure time of pop-up flights, these flights can still be safely inserted in the arrival stream. This can be accomplished by issuing speed instructions to both the pop-up flights and the rest of flights in the arrival traffic flow, involving minor adjustments and still feasible. Several simulations were carried out, in which trajectories for all flights were generated with a trajectory-optimization software.
This work represents an initial effort towards developing an automated support for ATCs to handle pop-up flights, laying the groundwork for a future concept of operations in the Japanese airspace aimed at enhancing efficiency in such scenarios.
