There’s no doubt Covid has been the longest and most profound challenge we’ve ever faced as an industry. In the short-term, for most, the focus naturally must remain on maintaining financial stability even as international travel begins to return.
Looking longer-term, the forecasts are still telling us that eventually air traffic demand will surpass historic 2019 peaks and again we will need to be doing everything we can to build more capacity and efficiency into the system.
What happens in-between is much less clear, but even now I believe it’s possible to proactively use this difficult period to prepare for recovery and perhaps even find ways of kick-starting growth as the rules allow.
How can we aid recovery?
Let’s start with the basic premise that airlines will fly when it is profitable to do so. Therefore anything that reduces the cost of flying will bring forward the point at which a route may be viable.
Fuel efficiency and delay avoidance are therefore obvious candidates to focus on.
For airports, many of whom have closed either parts of or entire terminals to reduce costs, knowing the exact tipping point when those assets need to be re-opened and how long to sweat the reduced set, could be critical in maintaining financial stability.
So predictability also feels like an important factor.
We’ve also seen passenger confidence be a key driver for recovery during past challenges. There are big questions: Is it covid-safe to travel? Will there be queues at the airport? Is aviation environmentally sustainable and is it morally justifiable to continue flying?
Predictability and fuel efficiency again both come into play.
So what can we as an air traffic management service influence? Realistically we’re talking about:
- Modernising airspace structures, but that requires much longer time horizons…
- Smoothing the flow of traffic and…
- Information sharing
Smoothing flow…
The London Airports have historically had some of the most efficient runways in the world – by that I mean the highest throughput per hour per runway.
I’m simplifying a little, but essentially that’s achieved by scheduling traffic very precisely and very close to the physical limit of the runway. During peak periods we flow traffic slightly above the landing or departure rate, creating a short queue that gives the controllers the opportunity to select the optimum runway sequence to maximise throughput.
The downside of this is that airborne holding is very fuel intensive.
For some time we’ve been working on concepts designed to maintain that highly efficient runway sequence whilst also reducing the need for a pool of aircraft to be there waiting in the hold. One part of that has been implementing time-based separations between arrivals using our Intelligent Approach controller support tool, the other is about optimising the sequence…
Logically it’s straightforward right? You just fix the runway sequence a little earlier and everyone just operates to that plan…?
But as we all know, whether it’s planes on the runway, gate allocations, planning ground handling resources, preparing staff rosters, or pretty much any other resource allocation activity, in our industry we have a big obstacle: PREDICTABILITY!
The vagaries of people’s behaviour, local and global weather conditions and the sheer interconnectedness of our industry all conspire against any attempt at predictability.
Is predictability an impossible barrier?
It would be easy to adopt a sort of paralysis in the face of so many competing and seemingly uncontrollable factors.
Unless we know something as fact we shouldn’t make any decisions for fear those decisions could be wrong, but we are not the only industry that faces such uncertainty. In the world of finance, predictions, estimation, and hedging are key tools to avoid that kind of paralysis.
So that brings me to what we as an industry CAN do. Anyone who knows me won’t be surprised that this is a good time to plug the established solutions like Airport-Collaborative Decision Making (A-CDM) and scheduling, but to really overcome the paralysis of uncertainty we need to push back the predictive time horizon, not just looking minutes or hours ahead, but days.
How can we look further ahead?
Technology is on our side now and we have been able to build a Demand-Capacity Balancer tool with our partners at Heathrow, Harris Orthogon, and the Met Office.
That has given us a predictive engine that brings together all sorts of data; schedules, weather forecasts, global winds, operational data, the simulation of ATC decisions, and by doing so has made it possible to predict hotspots and test alternative strategies.
In effect, it’s a safe environment that allows us to pre-empt problems and take decisions to mitigate for them before they even occur. Ultimately that means we can publish a much more accurate Airport Operating Plan or AOP ahead of the operational day. It’s like a supercharged version of A-CDM.
Through our involvement in SESAR Project PJ24, we have also able to demonstrate an important new tool in our battle for predictability – Target Time of Arrival (TTA).
During periods where we would ordinarily have to apply flow management regulations resulting in Calculated Take Off Times on the ground at other European Airports, our DCB tool now gives us the ability to cherry-pick and fine tune the individual flights that are regulated to ensure we are always maximising the throughput of the runway. In a trial we were able to show that in like-like regulation, using TTA resulted in between 25-40% less overall Air Traffic Flow Management delay than traditional regulation.
Using TTAs essentially lets you choose how much delay is taken in the air and how much is taken on the ground, so when we combine this with Cross-Border Arrival Management, it gives us an opportunity to build back differently as traffic recovers from Covid. We’re hoping this summer to trial different – lower – levels of airborne delay using the TTA concept, with the goal being to provide both predictability and lower fuel consumption.
Let's build a better future together
Covid has given us the opportunity to rebuild differently and to solve the fundamental problem of predictability. Providing predictability enables airlines, airports, and air traffic control to make consistent decisions that reduce delay, improve fuel efficiency, and ultimately reduce operating costs for all.
The tools are in our grasp, so now is the time to come together to deploy them collaboratively and consistently and make use of this once in a generation opportunity.