Costing Air Traffic Control Deviations

Abstract

1. Introduction. An air traffic control system maintains adequate separation between aircraft by requiring some aircraft to deviate from the paths which they would otherwise follow. In the absence of such deviations it must be assumed that civil transport aircraft would choose to operate at the most economical combination of airspeed, track and altitude (within the limits set by inaccuracies of weather prediction); A.T.C. deviations therefore involve economic penalty to the operator. It is important to assess the magnitude of such penalties for two reasons:(a) To provide a yardstick by which to compare different A.T.C. systems.(b) To give a measure of how much might justifiably be spent on new systems and equipment, to enable separation standards (and hence the penalty of deviations) to be reduced without reduction in safety.

Analysis of Long-Range Air Traffic Systems: Separation Standards — I

“…These limits lead to what we term 'safe separation standards'. Studies relating the cost of route deviations to the size of separation standards (a preliminary paper 9 on this subject appears in this issue) indicate that the economic penalty of setting standards a little above optimum is slight compared with the cost of collision due to setting them the same amount below. Therefore, the idea of safe separation standards is not an impractical one, provided our upper-limit method of estimating risks does not lead to grossly inflated standards: we are fairly confident that it will not.…”

Parallel-route Systems for Supersonic Traffic

“…As shown in Ref. 1, an increase in fuel reserves carries economic penalties in terms of increased fuel consumption because of greater weight and reduction of payload capacity. The latter penalty can be interpreted either in terms of revenue lost from payload turned away, or as the increased operating cost of a redesigned, larger aircraft, if this is chosen to avoid turning payload away.…”

The Costs of Terminal Area Delays

“…2 w e have used the terms 'mid', 'high' and 'upper' levels of cost to denote whether we include the cost of fuel to carry extra reserve, the lost revenue from displaced payload, or the penalty of using a re-designed aircraft. In previous reports!.…”