Separation Minima for Continuous Climb Operations

Abstract

Air transport planning takes new technologies, strategies, and procedures into consideration when optimizing both trajectory and air traffic management. Continuous Climb operations (CCO) are new optimal departing trajectories that minimize fuel consumption, emissions, and noise levels within the vicinity of airports. In contrast with previous research, this paper does not focus on the optimization techniques of these procedures but on the estimation of novel separation minima. First, the authors present the CCO model: climbing structure, operational concept, and simulations. Second, Monte Carlo simulations are performed to obtain a large, statistically significant sample. The uncertainty of CCO trajectories is modeled taking several factors into account, such as aircraft type, mass, speed, positioning error, temperature, and wind. Mass is the factor that adds most uncertainty to climbing trajectories. Afterward, the authors develop a conflict-resolution algorithm to perform systematic analysis of separation minima. This algorithm has two goals: 1) to ensure that separation minima between aircraft pairs performing CCO are not violated throughout the departure, and 2) to dynamically calculate the on-ground separation between CCO. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that an attempt has been made to quantify CCO separation minima. The results of the simulation confirm that the new CCO separation minima are larger than standard separation minima.