Eleven more U.S. airports are planning to adopt new landing methods that reduce both emissions and noise. All this is done by having the arriving plane turn off its engine and glide onto the tarmac like a paraglider.
The Federal Aviation Administration announced Monday that the plane is heading to Orlando, Florida. Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. Reno, Nevada. His six airports in South Florida will soon stop descending on runways. It’s called Optimized Profile Descent, and it’s already in place at over 60 US airports.
Traditionally, planes have performed “stair descents”. This is where air traffic controllers instruct pilots to reduce altitude in several intermediate stages before a full landing to avoid collisions in busy airspace.
A new landing method that allows planes to stay longer at cruising altitude and not burn fuel while descending stairs not only reduces carbon emissions, but also lowers noise levels.
Airlines save an average of 90,000 gallons of fuel and reduce emissions by 27,000 tons annually. This is equivalent to the amount of fuel used on his 62 Boeing 737 flights between New York and Cleveland. That’s the combined annual carbon footprint of more than 1,600 average Americans.
John-Paul Clark, professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, said: “I mean, win, win, win, win.”
Such fuel-efficient landings were not possible at many of the country’s busiest airports due to safety concerns. Without a robust model to calculate the descent speeds and altitudes of different planes of different sizes and shapes, it was too dangerous to glide onto the tarmac.
“Everybody knew from the beginning that if I cruised and waited until the last minute to do an idle descent, I would use less fuel,” Clark said. “The problem is that when 50 of his planes arrive at the airport, it’s very difficult to do.”
What has changed is the very model that Clark and his colleagues built in the early 2000s. This approach was first applied at Los Angeles International Airport and is now used at 64 airports nationwide, including Atlanta, Denver, Houston, Miami, Seattle, the District of Columbia and Las Vegas, to keep aircraft flying smoothly. It is now possible. Continuous arc during landing.
But the difficulty of locating busy American airspace has made it difficult for more airports to adopt optimized profile descents, Clark said. Since it is like “Swiss cheese” going through the .
Change is still happening, albeit slowly.
“We are investing in our entire system to provide our passengers with the best possible travel experience,” FAA Acting Administrator Billy Nollen said in a statement. “The era of choppy descents is coming to an end, with smoother landings and fuel savings in the process.”