The expected rapid growth in air traffic will lead to an increasing number of capacity constrained airports. Therefore airports have to improve significantly the runway and airport throughput while maintaining or increasing runway safety levels. In SESAR 2020 WAVE-1 this was mainly addressed by PJ02 with the four solutions:

• PJ.02-01: Wake turbulence separation optimisation
• PJ.02-02: Enhanced arrival procedures
• PJ.02-03: Minimum Pair Separations based on required surveillance performance
• PJ.02-08: Traffic optimisation on single and multiple runway airports

This VLD covers four solutions:

The use of aircraft type-specific pairwise separation will be used at Heathrow Airport, focusing on the runway occupancy time part of the overall TBS concept. At Vienna, the use of a wake decay enhancing device is intended to be demonstrated. There will be a demonstration at Zurich Airport of a concept known as ROCAT, which enables a reduction in the surveillance separation minimum for in-trail pairs on final approach, including a revised runway occupancy time aircraft classification. The benefits of an integrated AMAN-DMAN runway sequencer will be demonstrated at Stockholm Arlanda in shadow mode.

Together these demonstrations will collect evidence of the concept(s) within the overall time-based separation concept. As such the proposed large scale demo VLD3-W2 SORT closes the gap between the actual concept development and the deployment (or pre-industrialization) phases by demonstrating the operational and technical readiness. And by doing so de-risking the later deployment phases of these four solutions, either in real life trials and/or shadow modes trials at major European airports, this will ensure trust in the SESAR results.