Benefit Assessment of the Precision Departure Release Capability Concept

A Precision Departure Release Capability concept is being evaluated by both the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Federal Aviation Administration as part of a larger goal of improving throughput, efficiency and capacity in integrated departure, arrival and surface operations. The concept is believed to have the potential of increasing flight efficiency and throughput by avoiding missing assigned slots and minimizing speed increase or path stretch to recover the slot. The main thrust of the paper is determining the impact of early and late departures from the departure runway when an aircraft has a slot assigned either at a meter fix or at the arrival airport. Results reported in the paper are for two scenarios. The first scenario considers flights out of Dallas/Fort Worth destined for Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta flying through the Meridian meter-fix in the Memphis Center with miles-in-trail constraints. The second scenario considers flights destined to George Bush Intercontinental/Houston Airport with specified airport arrival rate constraint. Results show that delay reduction can be achieved by allowing reasonable speed changes in scheduling. It was determined that the traffic volume between Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta via the Meridian fix is low and the departures times are spread enough that large departure schedule uncertainty can be tolerated. Flights can depart early or late within 90 minutes without accruing much more delay due to miles-in-trail constraint at the Meridian fix. In the Houston scenario, 808 arrivals from 174 airports were considered. Results show that delay experienced by the 16 Dallas/Fort Worth departures is higher if initial schedules of the remaining 792 flights are kept unaltered while they are rescheduled. Analysis shows that the probability of getting the initially assigned slot back after perturbation and rescheduling decreases with increasing standard deviation of the departure delay distributions. Results show that most Houston arrivals can be expected to be on time based on the assumed zero-mean Normal departure delay distributions achievable by Precision Departure Release Capability. In the current system, airport-departure delay, which is the sum of gate-departure delay and taxi-out delay, is observed at the airports. This delay acts as a bias, which can be reduced by Precision Departure Release Capability.