Managing Air Traffic

With air travel having become less expensive, the exercise of maximising the number of aircraft that can be packed into the finite air space available, has acquired greater importance

Commissioned in 1999, the Cochin International Airport, which has the distinction of being the first international airport to be built in India through the public-private partnership route, is set to add a new feather to its cap. It has been nominated to incubate India’s first Required Navigation Performance (RNP) project. The approach procedure would be developed by Quovadis, a subsidiary of Airbus Industrie. The project, already underway, is expected to bring in benefits in the areas of enhanced safety and more efficient management of the congested airspace in the vicinity of airports.

Air Space Management

In general, the problem of air space management can be seen as consisting of two subsets, one dealing with en route flying and the other with the terminal stage. With air travel having become less expensive, proliferate and voluminous since the 1980s in the US and Europe, and in India since 2005, the exercise of maximising the number of aircraft that can be packed into the finite air space available en route as well as in the terminal phases of flights, has acquired greater importance. The International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) has had a role to play in regulating and standardising the initiatives in this direction and has enshrined the basic concepts and principles into a Performance Based Navigation (PBN) Manual, commonly referred to as ICAO Document 9613. This article looks at what PBN is and the promise of benefits it holds for aviation in the future.

With the rising volume of air traffic in the 1980s generating in its wake the inevitable air space management problems, the ICAO, through its future air navigation systems (FANS) Special Committee, issued a manual on required navigation performance (RNP) in 1999. As envisaged then, RNP was intended to lay down the navigation performance required by the users within a defined airspace. As the ICAO RNP definitions were not detailed enough for practical use, especially in continental and terminal airspace, additional requirements were developed. Simultaneously, in different parts of the world, area navigation (RNAV) was gradually developed with specific requirements. This process resulted in a proliferation of standards; interested readers would have come across an assortment of terms such as B-RNAV, P-RNAV, USRNAV, RNP 10, RNP/RNAV and RNP SAAAR with a great deal of confusion regarding concepts, terminology and definitions.