Using Surface Surveillance to Help Reduce Taxi Delays*

Taxi delay is the largest of all aviation movement delays. However, taxi-out delays have not received attention equal to that focused on airborne delays because taxi-out delays often result from downstream problems. Also, until recently, there was no practical means of tracking surface movements. New surface surveillance technology will revolutionize surface management by providing data for planning, timing, and monitoring surface operations. This paper proposes a simple aid to help manage departure taxi queues and help exploit existing departure capacity, while avoiding the delays that result from saturated queues and unbalanced runways. The proposed decision aide will use archived surveillance data to quantify queuing behavior and model departure capacity, and it will use real-time surveillance to track capacity changes and monitor the state of the taxi queues.