The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is currently pursuing acquisition of a system referred to as the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM). One of the proposed TFDM capabilities is a Decision Support Tool (DST) to assist controllers in sequencing and scheduling airport surface traffic with a goal of shifting delay from the taxi phase (where engines are presumably running) to the gate or non-movement area possibly allowing delays to be taken in an environment where the engines are off. The opportunity for taxi-time reduction using a virtual queue is recognized and well-documented. Less understood is the amount of the taxi-time shortfall that is realistically recoverable given operational constraints. We estimate the impact of two factors that limit the achievable benefit: gate availability and the need to ensure runway loading. Potential taxi-time savings results are produced for 43 US airports using a year of operational data at each site. The results examine the sensitivity to the two limiting factors and compare to other recent surface metering demonstrations and measurements.
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