Feasibility Study of Free Route Airspace over the North Pacific

Abstract

A fast-time simulation study was conducted to examine the expansion of flexible track operations into the area occupied by the five North Pacific (NOPAC) air traffic service routes, an area of high traffic demand. In this study, user-preferred routes were created in a proposed NOPAC free route airspace (FRA) area, in which airspace users may design routes with few constraints and compared with current fixed NOPAC route structure by fast-time simulation. To reflect the effect of daily and seasonal wind variations, a clustering analysis approach was applied to select representative wind conditions for flight route generation. Fuel burn was used to evaluate the effect of the NOPAC FRA on the efficiency of flight operations, and potential loss of separation (PLOS) was examined for three minimum lateral separations to evaluate the effects of communication, navigation, and surveillance performance on airspace capacity and air traffic control workload. The simulation results show a trend of increased efficiency of individual NOPAC FRA flight routes, with potential mean fuel consumption savings of 849.2 kg for eastbound Alaska flights and 532.4 kg for westbound North America flights compared with current route configurations. Results of PLOS also show reduced overall PLOS time. This indicates that a NOPAC FRA could improve capacity and efficiency while maintaining or increasing safety.