Human Systems Integration Division @ NASA Ames

LaGuardia (LGA) departure delay was identified by stakeholders and subject matter experts as a significant bottleneck in the New York metropolitan area. Departure delay at LGA is primarily due to the dependency between LGA's arrival and departure runways: LGA departures cannot begin takeoff until arrivals have cleared the runway intersection. If one-in one-out operations are not maintained and a significant arrival-to-departure imbalance occurs, the departure backup can persist through the rest of the day. At NASA Ames Research Center, a solution called "Departure-sensitive Arrival Spacing" (DSAS) was developed to maximize the departure throughput without creating significant delays in the arrival traffic. The concept leverages Terminal Sequencing and Spacing (TSS) operations that create and manage the arrival schedule to the runway threshold. In DSAS operations, an interface enhancement to the traffic manager's timeline was developed and applied to provide the ability to manually adjust inter-arrival spacing to build precise gaps for multiple departures between arrivals. With this set of capabilities, inter-arrival spacing could be controlled for optimal departure throughput. The concept was prototyped in a human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation environment so that operational requirements such as coordination procedures, timing and magnitude of TSS schedule adjustments, and display features for Tower, TRACON and Traffic Management Unit could be determined. The HITL simulation was conducted in August 2014 to evaluate the concept in terms of feasibility, controller workload impact, and potential benefits. Three conditions were tested, namely a Baseline condition without scheduling, a TSS condition with arrivals scheduled to the runway threshold, and a TSS+DSAS condition with the arrival schedule adjusted to maximize the departure throughput. The results showed that during high arrival demand periods, departure throughput could be incrementally increased under TSS and TSS+DSAS conditions without compromising the arrival throughput. The concept, operational procedures, and summary results were originally published in ATM20151 but detailed results were omitted. This paper expands on the earlier paper to provide detailed results on areas including throughput, conformance, delay, inter-arrival spacing including B757 and task load. In addition, results on workload, safety and efficiency are also reported. The more detailed result section provides extra insights into the challenges, feasibility and the potential benefits of the concept.