Air traffic delay grows each year. NASA is developing the Final Approach Spacing Tool (FAST) to help reduce airport arrival delays. FAST is intended to increase throughput and reduce delays. Analysis and field trials have suggested that FAST can help controllers increase arrival throughput on busy runways by several aircraft per hour. Published simulation studies have predicted that delay reduc...

Resilience of most critical infrastructures against failure of elements that appear insignificant is usually taken for granted. The World Airline Network (WAN) is an infrastructure that reduces the geographical gap between societies, both small and large, and brings forth economic gains. With the extensive use of a publicly maintained data set that contains information about airports and altern...

A number of the worlds’ major airports have a high proportion of their capacity utilised by a single airline, or alliance of airlines. At major US airports, for example, it is common for the leading carrier to account for threequarters or more of the flights; at European airports the proportions are generally smaller but often exceed 50 per cent (see Annex 1). This has lead to concerns that suc...

There are three main theoretical difficulties involved in relating sustainability to aviation, and which a research agenda for sustainable aviation needs to address. The first is uncertainty regarding the critical thresholds of global environmental systems. The second is a lack of protocols for allocating permissible environmental consumption shares to, and hence targets for, individual enterpr...

Abstract A range of early studies have been conducted to illustrate human mobility patterns using different tracking data, such as dollar notes, cell phones and taxicabs. Here, we explore human mobility patterns based on massive tracking data of US flights. Both topological and geometric properties are examined in detail. We found that topological properties, such as traffic volume (between air...

The method of radial velocities (RV) is applied to estimate aircraft wake vortex parameters from measurements conducted with pulsed coherent Doppler lidar (PCDL). Operations of the Stream Line lidar and the 2-µm PCDL are simulated numerically to analyze the accuracy of the estimated wake vortex parameters with the RV method. The RV method is also used to estimate wake vortex trajectories and ci...