Scheduling and separating departures crossing arrival flows in shared airspace

Flight efficiency and reduction of flight delays are among the primary goals of NextGen. In this paper, we propose a concept of shared airspace where departures fly across arrival flows, provided gaps are available in these flows. We have explored solutions to separate departures temporally from arrival traffic and pre-arranged procedures to support controllers' decisions. A Human-in-the-Loop simulation assessed the efficiency and safety of 96 departures from the San Jose airport (SJC) climbing across the arrival airspace of the Oakland and San Francisco arrival flows. In the simulation, the SJC tower had a tool to identify departures that could fly through predicted gaps in the arrival flow. When the timing of departures did not align with gaps in the arrival flows and separation could not be ensured, a safe but less efficient route was provided to the departures to fly underneath the arrival flows. Coordination using a point-out procedure allowed the arrival controller to control the SJC departures right after take-off. The simulation manipulated the accuracy of departure time (accurate vs. inaccurate) as well as which sector took control of the departures after takeoff (departure vs. arrival sector) in a 2×2 full factorial design. Results show that coordination time decreased and climb efficiency increased when the arrival sector controlled the aircraft right after takeoff. Also, climb efficiency increased when the departure times were more accurate. Coordination was shown to be a critical component of tactical operations in shared airspace. Although workload, coordination, and safety were judged by controllers as acceptable in the simulation, it appears that in the field, controllers would need improved tools and coordination procedures to support this procedure.