Determining the Location of Runway Exits Using Airport Surface Detection Equipment

Airport surface detection equipment, such as ASDE-X, is used by thirty-five commercially operated airports throughout the United States. ASDE-X is responsible for the safe monitoring of aircraft movements as well as ground support vehicle operating on the airfield. Like most radar-based technologies, ASDE-X can report the position of any aircraft within a one second time interval. This data not only contains the geographic position, but also reports speed, heading, altitude, and aircraft specific characteristics. Using a quantitative approach, this research will use the data reported by ASDE-X to analyze current runway exit locations and develop an improved method of determining the location of runway exits. Currently, the Federal Aviation Administration is using an out-of-date nonstandard categorization based on maximum takeoff weight to determine the location of runway exits. This research uses data from ASDE-X to determine the best categorization using the current Federal Aviation Administration’s airport design reference categorization. This study found the Airplane Design Group, or ADG, to be the best reference to locate runway exit locations. Reformed tables depicting the percent of capture of each ADG based on the location of a runway exit were created based on the quantitative analysis of operational data. These tables included the location of both high-speed runway exits as well as right-angled runway exits. This research recommends future studies at additional airports to determine the effect of airport elevation, geometric layouts, and geometric constraints. It is also recommended to study if a method of analyzing ASDE-X data can assist in determine runway length requirements

Benefits of Additional Runway Crossings on Parallel Runway Operations

As the air transportation industry expands, airports face numerous challenges to manage the increasing traffic. Among these problems, runway crossings are a considerable source of ground traffic inefficiency and risk. Building end-around taxiways are the only strategy to avoid crossings, but these are not always feasible, and therefore airport planners must find alternatives. This study consisted of a simulation over an airport that currently requires a vast amount of its arrivals to go through runway crossings in order to reach the apron; the airport simulation software utilized was the Total Airspace and Airport Modeler (TAAM). The process began with a thorough validation of a baseline model against the historical data of the airport, followed by the design and simulation of three alternatives, which had one, two, and three runway crossings subsequently added. The simulation also included two flight schedules resembling the operations of 2016 and 2026, in order to forecast the impact of the additional crossings in the upcoming years. Finally, an analysis with ANOVAs and t-tests of the simulation outputs revealed significant decreases in arrival and departure taxi times, along with no significant changes in runway or sequencing delay