Why

Despite the current low traffic volumes caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the expected rapid growth in air traffic will lead to an increasing number of capacity constrained airports. Therefore, airports have to improve significantly the runway and airport throughput while maintaining or increasing runway safety levels.

What/how

The SORT project (VLD3-W2) tested seven solutions delivered by the SESAR Joint Undertaking: optimised separation delivery on final approach (ORD, PJ.02-01-01) wake turbulence separations (for arrivals) based on aircraft type-specific static aircraft characteristics (S-PWS, PJ.02-01-04) reduction of wake turbulence risk considering acceleration of wake vortex decay in ground proximity (PJ.02-01-07) minimum pair separations based on required surveillance performance (RSP, PJ.02-03) trajectory based integrated runway sequence function (IRSF, PJ.02-08-01 and PJ.02-08-02) and increased runway throughput based on local ROT characterisation (ROCAT, PJ.02-08-03).

The demonstration covered the following exercises:

• A demonstration combining ORD, S-PWS, RSP, and ROT at Heathrow airport.
• The use of aircraft type-specific static pairwise separation (S-PWS) with reduced minimum radar separation (MRS) being implemented at Heathrow Airport, focussing on the runway occupancy time (ROT) part of the overall time-based separation solution.
• The industrialisation of a wake decay enhancing devices is intended to be demonstrated at Vienna.
• The benefits of an integrated AMAN-DMAN runway sequence function (IRSF) being demonstrated at Stockholm Arlanda in shadow mode.

Together these demonstrations collected evidence of the concept(s) within the overall time-based separation concept. As such the proposed large-scale demo VLD3-W2-SORT closed the gap between the actual concept development and the deployment (or pre-industrialisation) phases by demonstrating the operational and technical readiness. And by doing so paving the way to the deployment phases of these four solutions, either in real life trials and/or shadow modes trials at major European airports, which ensure trust in the SESAR results.

Open Day at NATS - 15 June 2023

Download the presentation pack

December 2022: SESAR Innovation Days 2022

Download SORT paper

Download SORT poster