THE NEW AIRSPACE MODEL FOR FLIGHT PLANNING AT FREE ROUTE AIRSPACE

Abstract

The continuous increase in the world's population, which according to the United Nations (UN) forecasts, will peak at 10 billion people in 2064, translates into increased demand for transportation services, including air transport1. EUROCONTROL estimates a 96% increase in the number of flights, which will cause airspace capacity inconveniences2. This entails a number of undesirable consequences, namely delays in the arrival and departure sector, increased costs for carriers, declining safety levels and a growing dissatisfaction among passengers. Flight planning systems which use airways in the airspace of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) member states do not provide effective optimization. Planned routes are longer in comparison to optimal trajectories, which translates into fuel consumption and negative impact that the aviation sector has on the environment. This work aims to examine the possibility of improving the efficiency of air route planning in the Free Route Airspace (FRA), using a graph-based airspace model. In the study, the thesis was adopted that it is possible to distribute graph node points at the vertices of zones not available for planning at a given time. Verification of the test results was carried out by comparing flight routes planned in the developed airspace model with those obtained in the validation of the SESAR 2020 PJ06 ToBeFREE project. An Alsim AL200 MCC class flight simulator was used for the validation work.