Impact of Gate Availability on Departure Metering Benefits

摘要

As air travel demand continues to increase, it is important to take measures to mitigate the resulting monetary and environmental impacts of the excessive congestion that will increase at major airports. The Next Generation Air Transportation System proposes to apply a departure metering capability, which manages the departure queue size by holding aircraft on the gates or in non-movement areas of an airport when there is excessive congestion on the airport movement area. The benefits of departure metering are measured by savings in taxi times and corresponding savings in fuel burn, reduction in emissions and noise, and providing flexibility to airlines and convenience to passengers as more delay is incurred at the gates instead of on the taxiways. A sensitivity analysis is presented that characterized the dependency of departure metering on the availability of gates and non-movement areas at an airport, using the LaGuardia International Airport as an example. First, the appropriate number of departure aircraft that departure metering should maintain in the movement area was determined at the level that resulted in runway throughput saturation and in negligible impact on the aircraft takeoff time. The departure benefits in terms of taxi savings were quantified at this level of metering and with no gate availability limitations. Then, the gate availability limitation was modeled implicitly by varying the number of gates available and the duration of gate occupancy. It was observed that with the current number of gates and with gate occupancy of one to two hours, the taxi savings are significantly reduced from the possible savings that resulted with no gate limits.