Fuel and Energy Benchmark Analysis of Continuous Descent Operations

Fricke, Hartmut; Seiß, Christian; Herrmann, R

doi:10.2514/atcq.23.1.83

Cited by 31 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Larger aircraft during low traffic scenarios in specific airports seem to show the biggest potential benefits. This is also supported by the findings of Fricke et al 6 where the effects of level-off segments at different altitudes were directly related to additional fuel burn increasing with the length of the level-off and with the altitude where the level-off takes place (the lower the altitude the greater the additional fuel burn). The relationship between the additional fuel burn and the altitude was found not to be linear, demonstrating that removing level-offs at lower altitude allows for the biggest fuel savings.…”

Section: Continuous Descent Operationssupporting

confidence: 81%

An Operator-Focussed Metric for Measuring Predictability and Efficiency of Descent Operations

Bronsvoort¹,

Huynh²,

Enea

2016

16th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference

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Many Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) aim to report on the number of continuous descents conducted in their administered airspace. The method with which this reporting is undertaken varies between ANSPs, but often the metric includes measuring the distance flown at level altitude. While such a metric tests if a descent was continuous, it does not necessarily mean the descent was also efficient. In this paper a metric and deriving algorithm will be proposed that tests if a descent was a managed descent. The major difference between a managed descent and a continuous descent is that a managed descent is performed in a predictable manner to a pre-determined plan by the aircraft's Flight Management System (FMS). A managed descent is in general continuous, but not necessarily vice versa. Often, whenever it is referred to continuous descent, it is the predictability of an automation managed descent that the airspace operator ultimately wants to achieve, and what an ANSP should facilitate. Derivation of the proposed metric algorithm and its application is demonstrated based on flight data from Australia and the United States. While the first basic implementation of the metric has yet a number of limitations, its application identified differences between the efficiency of descent trajectories where the conventional metric, in terms of detecting level segments, did not. In addition, application on US flight data demonstrated how the metric can assist in analysing the performance of ground-based trajectory prediction tools.

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Section: Continuous Descent Operationssupporting

confidence: 81%

An Operator-Focussed Metric for Measuring Predictability and Efficiency of Descent Operations

Bronsvoort¹,

Huynh²,

Enea

2016

16th AIAA Aviation Technology, Integration, and Operations Conference

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“…The study of Thipphavong et al (2012) implemented an adaptive aircraft weight algorithm to improve the accuracy of climbing predictions. Fricke et al (2015) illustrated the significant influence of aircraft mass on fuel burn during continuous descent operations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aircraft initial mass estimation using Bayesian inference method

Sun

Ellerbroek

Hoekstra

2018

Transportation Research Part C: Emerging Technologies

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Aircraft mass is a crucial piece of information for studies on aircraft performance, trajectory prediction, and many other topics of aircraft traffic management. However, It is a common challenge for researchers, as well as air traffic control, to access this proprietary information. Previously, several studies have proposed methods to estimate aircraft weight based on specific parts of the flight. Due to inaccurate input data or biased assumptions, this often leads to less confident or inaccurate estimations. In this paper, combined with a fuel-flow model, different aircraft initial masses are computed independently using the total energy model and reference model at first. It then adopts a Bayesian approach that uses a prior probability of aircraft mass based on empirical knowledge and computed aircraft initial masses to produce the maximum a posteriori estimation. Variation in results caused by dependent factors such as prior, thrust and wind are also studied. The method is validated using 50 test flights of a Cessna Citation II aircraft, for which measurements of the true mass were available. The validation results show a mean absolute error of 4.3% of the actual aircraft mass.

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“…The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has published some CDO guidance material [4] to support air navigation service providers (ANSP) to design vertical corridors in which all descent trajectories must be contained, helping in this way to strategically separate them from other procedures in the vicinity. However, as reported in [5], these criteria have been established without explicitly considering the aircraft type, assuming international standard atmosphere (ISA) conditions and with coarse assumptions regarding the aircraft gross mass and performance data. This leads, in the majority of cases, to too restrictive corridors that limit the potential CDO adherence in real operations.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optimal assignment of 4D close-loop instructions to enable CDOs in dense TMAs

García

Codina

Menéndez

2018

2018 IEEE/AIAA 37th Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC)

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Continuous descent operations (CDOs) with required times of arrival (RTAs) represent a potential solution to reduce the environmental impact in terminal maneuvering areas without degrading capacity. However, flight management systems require to know the remaining distance to the metering fix in order to compute the CDO complying with the CTA. This paper assesses the feasibility of replacing the current air traffic control sequencing and merging techniques, which are mainly based on open-loop vectoring, by a control based on RTAs over known and pre-defined arrival routes (i.e., with known distances to go). An optimal control problem has been formulated and solved in order to generate CDO trajectories, while a mixedinteger-linear programming model was build in order to solve the aircraft landing problem in the metering fix. The assessment has been performed for Berlin-Schönefeld airport (Germany), by using arrival traffic gathered from historical data and by taking advantage of its tromboning procedure. Furthermore, a second scenario was studied by adding more simulated traffic to the existing one. Results show that, after assigning an RTA and a route to every arriving aircraft, a time separation of 120 is ensured in the metering fix, while at least 90 seconds of separation are maintained in the the rest of waypoints of the procedure.

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Fuel and Energy Benchmark Analysis of Continuous Descent Operations

Cited by 31 publications

References 6 publications

An Operator-Focussed Metric for Measuring Predictability and Efficiency of Descent Operations

An Operator-Focussed Metric for Measuring Predictability and Efficiency of Descent Operations

Aircraft initial mass estimation using Bayesian inference method

Optimal assignment of 4D close-loop instructions to enable CDOs in dense TMAs

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