Airport surface congestion can be a cause of significant increases in taxi times, fuel burn and emissions at major airports. Various surface congestion management techniques are being developed to help mitigate these issues at different airports, typically by holding aircraft at the gate during times of high congestion to reduce the number of aircraft on the active movement area. This paper presents an approach to estimate the benefits in terms of reductions in active taxi time and fuel burn of applying such techniques at a subset of US airports, both under current and expected future operations. Results show that the benefits of surface congestion management translate to billions of gallons of reduced fuel burn and huge environmental impact reduction over the next twenty years.
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