Assessment of the Method of Merging Landing Aircraft Streams in the Context of Fuel Consumption in the Airspace

The most important directions in the field of sustainable development of air transport concern increasing the capacity of airports and improving the global civil aviation system, improving air traffic safety, and developing procedures to optimize the operation of the aviation system. An important area is environmental protection and measures to minimize the negative impact of civil aviation activities on the environment. Air traffic and the operation of airports generate adverse environmental effects, including greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and noise emissions. Due to the high intensity of aircraft maneuvers, the authors analyzed aircraft traffic in the area approaching the airport. It is essential to correctly line up for aircraft reporting from different entry points to the approach area to avoid waiting for landing. Misalignment of landing aircraft negatively impacts airport capacity, increases fuel consumption through more prolonged waiting times in space, and directly impacts air pollution. There are different ways to organize landing aircraft flows and other ways to merge these flows. The article aims to assess the method of combining the streams of landing aircraft and estimate the impact of such an organization on the increased fuel consumption of aircraft and thus on air pollution. The authors proposed a measure for assessing the quality of the landing queue, which was defined as the increase in flight time of aircraft in the approach area in relation to the nominal time, which was adopted as minimization. In order to obtain the results of research works, a model using a Petri net was developed, allowing for flexible mapping of concurrent processes and their effect analysis. Various methods of combining the streams of landing aircraft have been adopted: three-stage, two-stage, and single-stage. Then, simulation experiments were carried out, allowing the determination of whether the method of combining the streams of landing planes has an impact on the quality of the landing queue measured with the proposed index. The obtained results of the assessment can be used to estimate the increased fuel consumption of the aircraft.