Modernization of the airline fleet avionics is essential to fully enable future technologies and procedures for increasing national airspace system capacity. However in the current national airspace system, system-wide benefits gained by avionics upgrade are not fully returned to aircraft/airlines that upgrade, resulting in a slow fleet modernization rate. Preferential merging is a best-equipped-best-served concept designed to incentivize avionics upgrade among airlines by allowing aircraft with new avionics (high-equipped) to be re-sequenced ahead of aircraft without the upgrades flow-equipped) at en-route merge waypoints. The goal of this study is to investigate the potential benefits gained by airlines under a high or low-equipped fleet scenario if preferential merging is implemented, using historical data for arrival flights into Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
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