Collaborative Airport Surface Metering for Efficiency and Environmental Benefits

Efficiency and environmental benefits can be simultaneously achieved through operational improvements in the National Airspace System (NAS). This paper addresses the concept of collaborative airport surface metering (CASM), which provides efficiency and environmental benefits through detailed advanced planning and management of airport surface departure operations. When departure demand exceeds capacity at an airport today, departure flights experience delay while waiting for their turn on the departure runway. However, aircraft must still push back and taxi toward the runway to claim their first-come-first-served departure slot. Under the CASM concept, metering techniques will be used at tower-controlled airports to assign a tactical departure slot for all departure flights when departure demand exceeds capacity. This paper addresses the potential benefits of this concept in regard to efficiency and environmental benefits associated with reduction of emissions. Through analysis of flight schedules and statistics from historical operations, the potential benefits of this concept have been evaluated. Environmental benefits result from the reduction of emissions. Based on the analysis of change in queuing time required for departure flights with the CASM concept, the change in the amount of engine emissions has been estimated. This analysis considers the effects of earlier required flight push-backs to avoid gate contention and the additional complexity of flights pushing back from the gate not in the order of runway departure time.