Control of airborne delays by adjusting ground delays: an option to reduce CO2 emissions?

View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3835.vid This paper investigates the theoretical feasibility of controlling arrival airborne delays by acting on ground delays at departure airports, with the aim to reduce CO2 emissions. One challenge lies in the decision making to trigger ground delays few hours in advance under uncertainties in airborne delays prediction and during flight execution. We performed a sensitivity analysis, considering a control of the average airborne delay per 30 minutes period, varying the target from 10 down to 2 minutes, and measuring airborne delays, ground delays and runway throughput. We developed a simulation model of the arrival flow management process with a simplified regulation mechanism to trigger ground delays and realistic uncertainties on off-block, take-off time and flight duration. We selected four European airports subject to significant airborne delays in 2019 and with a median flight duration of 2 hours. We considered standard days and extracted results of the peak periods with airborne delays exceeding 10 minutes in the simulated “today” scenario, for a total duration of 1,900 hours and with 60,000 flights. Simulation results show that airborne delays can be effectively controlled, until a 6 minutes or even a 4 minutes target, while the 2 minutes target is missed. With the 6 minutes target scenario, for the four airports (weighted average), the cumulated airborne delays decreases by 56% compared to the “today” scenario (from 7 hours down to 3 hours) leading to a reduction of 19 tons of CO2 per peak hour, with no apparent detrimental effect on the runway throughput. However, with the uncertainties and exempted flights, the average total delay (airborne + ground) increases by 10% (from 8 hours to 9 hours), and the 90th percentile of the ground delay per flight from 13 to 29 minutes. These trends confirm the interest to extend these investigations, in particular regarding the impact on the network, departure airports and airspace user’s operations.