Abstract
Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport was the second European airport in terms of traffic in 2019, having transported 76.2 million passengers. Its large infrastructures include four runways, a large taxiway network, and 298 aircraft parking stands (131 contact) among three terminals. With the current pandemic in place, the European air traffic network has declined by −65% flights when compared with 2019 traffic (pre-COVID-19), having a severe negative impact on the aviation industry. More and more often taxiways and runways are used as parking spaces for aircraft as consequence of the drastic decrease in air traffic. Furthermore, due to safety reasons, passenger terminals at many airports have been partially closed. In this work we want to study the effect of the reduction in the physical facilities at airports on airspace and airport capacity, especially in the Terminal Manoeuvring Area (TMA) airspace, and in the airport ground side. We have developed a methodology that considers rare events such as the current pandemic, and evaluates reduced access to airport facilities, considers air traffic management restrictions and evaluates the capacity of airport ground side and airspace. We built scenarios based on real public information on the current use of the airport facilities of Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport and conducted different experiments based on current and hypothetical traffic recovery scenarios. An already known optimization metaheuristic was implemented for optimizing the traffic with the aim of avoiding airspace conflicts and avoiding capacity overloads on the ground side. The results show that the main bottleneck of the system is the terminal capacity, as it starts to become congested even at low traffic (35% of 2019 traffic). When the traffic starts to increase, a ground delay strategy is effective for mitigating airspace conflicts; however, it reveals the need for additional runways.
Highlights
As of 2020, the entire aviation industry was facing its most difficult challenges, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world
We took as reference the flight schedule of one day in 2016 (19 February 2019), where the air traffic was at its peak and which was similar to the one in 2019 [39]
In this scenario we find in total 94 airspace conflicts, which reveals that the arrival flow in the Terminal Manoeuvring Area (TMA) is very congested
Summary
As of 2020, the entire aviation industry was facing its most difficult challenges, as the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world. The lower peak was reached in April 2020 when the air traffic decreased by 87.1% compared to 2019. The 2020 summer season recovered some traffic, reaching a high peak of −52.9% compared to 2019. As the winter season started and more and more measures against the COVID-19 pandemic were taken by local countries, the air traffic again decreased, and it remained at −64.4% as of the third week of March [1]. EUROCONTROL’s 5-year forecast presents three scenarios considering different variables such as the availability of mass vaccination, the impact on the global economy and the potential reduction in demand (i.e., business travelers). The most optimistic scenario assumes the vaccine will be widely available for travelers by the summer of 2021—it shows a recovery of traffic to the same levels as 2019
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