Departure Metering

Traditionally, airport departures are managed on a first-come/first-served basis. Aircraft taxi out and take their place in the queue in order to be sequenced for takeoff. But when demand exceeds capacity, the result can be long departure waits, surface congestion, gate holdouts, and delays and costs that upset an airline’s schedules – not to mention its passengers.

Unfortunately, there hasn't been an effective way to fairly, transparently, and efficiently coordinate departures to minimize extended taxi-out queues and fuel burn while ensuring that all available departure capacity is efficiently utilized. Until the PASSUR Integrated Traffic Management (PITM) program, that is. PASSUR’s Departure Metering solution combines extensive surveillance data and powerful air traffic management software to provide automated decision-support capabilities that enable carriers to reduce:

• Time spent in taxi-out queues with engines on
• Fuel burn/carbon emissions
• Threat of costly Tarmac Delay events (3+ hour onboard delays)
• Engine wear/maintenance

PASSUR’s Departure Metering solution creates a “virtual departure queue”, in which departures are metered before they “call for service” from the tower. As a result, once aircraft enter the active taxiway they are ready to depart quickly. The departures themselves are allocated and sequenced based on schedule, actual demand, and capacity.

An automated slot management program fairly and equitably organizes departure slot requests and assignments in 15-minute increments. Slot times are pre-populated at least two hours in advance, and flights are held at the gate or in a common “metering area” until their slot time comes up – at which time they are “delivered” to the tower with an uncongested path to runway and takeoff.

With this solution, carriers can efficiently and accurately predict arrival vs. departure demand and system capacity, ensuring optimal operations and minimized performance impacts.