Best paper Award in Trajectory Optimisation Track - ICRAT 2016Speed reduction strategies have proved to be useful
to recover delay if air traffic flow management regulations are
cancelled before initially planned. Considering that for short-
haul flights the climb and descent phases usually account for
a considerable percentage of the total trip distance, this paper
extends previous works on speed reduction in cruise to the whole
flight. A trajectory optimization software is used to compute
the maximum airborne delay (or linear holding) that can be
performed without extra fuel consumption if compared with
the nominal flight. Three cases are studied: speed reduction
only in cruise; speed reduction in the whole flight, but keeping
the nominal cruise altitude; and speed reduction for the whole
flight while also optimizing the cruise altitude to maximize delay.
Three representative flights have been simulated, showing that
the airborne delay increases significantly in the two last cases
with nearly 3-fold time for short-haul flights and 2-fold for mid-
hauls with the first case. Results also show that fuel and time are
traded along different phases of flight in such a way the airborne
delay is maximized while the total fuel burn is kept constant.Peer ReviewedAward-winningPostprint (published version
