Cost Efficiency of an Aircraft Arrival Speed Profile

Over the past thirty years, the civil aeronautical community has actively pursued research to enable efficient and environmentally friendly arrival operations. One outcome of this research is a collection of new ground automation tools, developed to assist air traffic controllers (ATC) in managing traffic while maintaining safety. Another outcome is a set of Optimal Profile Descent (OPD) and Continuous Descent Arrival (CDA) procedures, designed to reduce emissions and noise. Recent years have seen significant efforts to integrate these new tools and procedures to manage arrival flights even more efficiently. In one such research activity, each arrival flight is scheduled to pass certain points along a specific route defined from the transition airspace all the way to the runway. This approach was initially called precision scheduling and, in later literature,renamed to precision operations. With this approach, air traffic controllers would use speed clearances as the primary means of guiding flights, reserving vectoring clearances for exceptions only. Precision operations, with its speed control, is in contrast to the conventional approach, in which aircraft follow a routine of vectoring clearances from ATC upon entering the terminal airspace.