553 – The World of Statistical Analysis Professionals
Minimizing Flight Technical Error for Arrivals at Busy Airports: Why Would We Want to Do Such a Thing?
Sponsor: Section for Statistical Programmers and Analysts
Keywords: Flight Technical Error, Least-Squares Estimation, Stochastic Models, Geomatic Engineering
Timothy Hall
PQI Consulting
To advance aviation safety throughout the National Airspace System, the concept of Flight Technical Error (FTE) is defined to measure the extent to which an aircraft's arrival path deviates from the arrival runway extended centerline. Among many other uses, the FTE measure is used to make sure the wakes from aircraft arriving on closely-spaced parallel runways do not endanger each other's safe operation. This paper documents a least-squares best-fit FTE stochastic formulation based on two-dimensional straight-line arrival track data.