GE (NYSE: GE) and American Airlines on Thursday completed the first U.S. flight using a publicly available, commercially designed instrument flight path. The flight path is part of airspace modernization efforts to reduce delays, slash aircraft CO2 emissions and improve operating efficiency.
Naverus, a part of GE Aviation, designed the “highway in the sky”, which incorporates Required Navigation Performance technology (RNP), a core component of the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) NextGen airspace modernization plan. RNP paths can be custom-tailored to reduce airport congestion, shorten trip distance, reduce an aircraft’s time in flight, and create community-friendly flight trajectories that lessen the effect of aircraft noise.
“Modernizing the U.S. air traffic management system is a monumental task that requires the best efforts of government and private sectors alike. Today we showed how third-party navigation providers, like GE, and airlines, like American, are helping accelerate these improvements,” said Naverus General Manager Steve Forte.
The new landing procedure, which became a permanent fixture at Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut, on Thursday, allows pilots to use onboard technology to follow a precise track, independent of aging ground-based navigation beacons that limit where the aircraft can go. As a result, GE said the Bradley procedure will enable airliners to land on Runway 15 during periods of low clouds and visibility that previously would have stopped them from landing there.
GE is a leader in RNP, deploying effective RNP procedures around the world and is the first third-party procedure designer to publish a public RNP procedure in the U.S. In Canada, China, Australia, New Zealand, Peru and now, the United States, GE’s RNP procedures are in regular daily use.
“RNP flight paths are an important part of a larger GE effort that is pioneering new ways to optimize aircraft operations from gate to gate,” said GE Aviation Systems Technical Fellow Steve Fulton. “Other components of this effort include advanced features of GE flight computers, like the one aboard the American Airlines flight today, which allow pilots to fly RNP paths and enable them to select pre-designated arrival times at runways and even at exact points along the route.”
Additionally, GE is working with the FAA and other regulatory bodies and navigation service providers around the world to develop the capability for aircraft to share optimized flight trajectories with air traffic control in real time, and to ‘negotiate’ modifications to those trajectories when necessary. This ultimately will allow airlines to plan each and every flight to operate on the most efficient flight path with the least possible environmental impact.
Navigational and operational capabilities such as these will make air traffic management more efficient by helping airlines plan more direct routes, decreasing airspace congestion, saving fuel and reducing commercial aviation’s greenhouse gas emissions—which have increased 80% over the past 20 years. Without new RNP flight paths and other essential upgrades, FAA estimates that by 2015 the current air traffic control system will be unable to handle the 50% increase in airplanes and passengers expected over the next decade.
RNP procedures can provide different benefits, depending on their design. GE specifically designed the Bradley Airport RNP approach to provide pilots with continuous vertical guidance to Runway 15 while allowing them to land when the cloud ceiling is as low as 350 feet above the ground. Prior to the new RNP approach, the existing instrument approach procedure for the runway provided no continuous vertical flight guidance and was of no benefit to airlines when cloud ceilings were lower than 1,000 feet above the ground. It’s anticipated that the new RNP approach will improve the utility of Bradley’s Runway 15 and provide pilots and controllers with additional navigation flexibility during periods of adverse weather or winds.
In June, the FAA Thursday announced $125 million in contracts to develop and demonstrate technologies that will reduce commercial jet fuel consumption, emissions and noise.
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