Airport quality : holding and go-arounds

Aircraft surveillance technology is currently undergoing a major transition. It is moving from exclusively relying on conventional air-traffic management systems such as Primary and Secondary Surveillance Radar towards also incorporating a new generation of air-traffic management tools. Drivers for this change are, among others, increased air traffic, increased precision achieved by the new systems and potential improvements for aircraft routing. One key component of the next generation tools is Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast (ADS-B). Its core idea is that planes determine their own location using the on-board GPS equipment and transmit that information regularly. Most countries demand that airplanes are equipped with ADS-B before a certain point in the near future. In European airspace, planes have to be equipped with ADS-B by 2017 [6]. Most commercial airplanes in Europe are already equipped with ADS-B hardware and emit signals during flight. Available to us is a subset of these signals picked up by receivers of the OpenSky network, collected in September 2015. In this project, our focus lies on holding and go-arounds. It seems odd that in a time of very advanced technology for position detection and sophisticated routing algorithms even in consumer-grade hardware, aircraft routing is still not able to manage planes in a way that eliminates holding. Every minute spent in holding leads to a considerable amount of wasted fuel, adding to the already bad carbon footprint of air traffic in general. Instead of holding, a plane could (potentially) have taken off later or flown with reduced speed for appropriate time. We want to find out at which airports holding is frequent and which airlines frequently fly holding. As an end result, we will present a ranking of airports and airlines. We aim to do the same for go-arounds, although from an environmental perspective, they are not as bad as holding, as they are mainly done for safety purposes and therefore much harder to prevent. 2. RELATED WORK