End of stacking?

Frankly am a tad shocked that slowing approaching aircraft hasn’t been in place for years given the environmental impact of stacking over cities.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3151643/Speed-limits-planes-end-airport-stacking-New-air-traffic-tell-aircraft-350-miles-away-slow-arrive-land-precise-time.html

F1 has been accurately using simulation for over 10 years, to optimise pit stops to get clean air/minimal traffic impact during a GP.

MartynSinclair – This initiative is part of the Heathrow XMAN (cross border) arrivals management work currently being undertaken between various Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) comprising NATS (UK), IAA (Ireland), DSNA (France) & MUAC (Eurocontrol Maastricht). There is a wider XMAN concept well developed but at the moment Heathrow is the only airport where this technique is being used, but others will be on line soon.

Currently the Heathrow arrival delay is passed electronically to the adjacent ATC centres and the controllers, if there is sufficient delay, will slow a Heathrow arrival down by as much as Mach 0.04. This means that the aircraft will still have an arrival delay but instead of having, say, a 10 minute orbital delay in the stack, the aircraft will have a 2 minute linear delay (by flying slower en-route) and flying an orbit hold for a shorter period of time.

I know that there is still delay in the network, but this is being absorbed in a more fuel efficient portion of the flight. The eventual aim is to have no stack holding at all, but this relies on accurate Departure and Arrival Management tools, and these are a few years off yet. What we are seeing though is the first step to a more co-ordinated arrival stream maximising efficiency with the airlines.

One final note, we could have no delay tomorrow at airports like Heathrow, but that would mean an arrival rate of 30 aircraft per hour, rather than the current 40+ arrivals per hour that NATS currently provides for 16 hours per day. Having a hold gives ATC the opportunity to turn the non-uniform delivery of aircraft into a stack into a uniform delivery of aircraft to the runway, and this work to move the delay is a step change in arrivals management.

Going forwards 1000nm is a reality. There is talk in the industry of managing aririvals from further afield (across the N Atlantic) with Target Times of Arrivals (TTAs), and these have been trialled in the past.

Seems like a sensible idea to me. There seems no point in aircraft tanking it to LHR to then spend a lot of accumulative time (and creating a lot of accumulative pollution) over our towns, cities and countryside in a stack waiting for a slot to land.

MartynSinclair – Currently the procedure has aircraft starting to slow down by M0.04 at 350nm from Heathrow

Not sure if this counts as stacking management, but I’m sure most of us have experienced that annoying delay, when you’re pushed back from the gate on time, taxi to an area near the end of the runway, your engines are switched off and you wait until LHR clears you straight in. thus avoiding a stack over the green fields of the SE.

This happened too many times to remember, the worst delay being 120 minutes, it’s only 50 minutes flying time from EDI to LHR. Very frustrating watching AF, LH, KL planes departing before you,, even though they were scheduled after you…

Also not sure if this counts too, but when the 380’s first started flying into LHR,, when at all possible the EK & SQ flights would follow each other in thus minimising the gap between smaller aircraft.

I am a bit confused, many a time I have boarded an aircraft with a slight delay and then just sat on the ground while the pilot waits for a new slot to become available at LHR and LGW. That has happened to me as I recall at AMS, MAD and CPH and possibly others. This thread seems to be suggesting I have imagined it, or am I just confused in my old age?

Whilst NATS’ CEO announced the end of Stacking, they’ve just produced this video of the worlds busiest piece of controlled airspace https://vimeo.com/132804154