Evaluation of London Heathrow Using the Airport Business Suite
Paul C. Roling · 7th AIAA ATIO Conf, 2nd CEIAT Int'l Conf on Innov and Integr in Aero Sciences,17th LTA Systems Tech Conf; followed by 2nd TEOS Forum · 2007
There are essentially two ways to allow for increase of the demand for travel, more flights or larger aircraft. For London Heathrow there are two main plans for allowing additional airside capacity to reduce congestion and handle these additional flights, namely adding an extra runway and switching to mixed mode operations. According to this study using the Airport Business Suite, only switching to mixed mode will not allow any additional flights with lower than current delays, when the increase in the weight class of used aircraft is taken into account. Having two mixed mode runways and an extra runway only for arrivals will allow a 46% increase in the number of flights. Having larger instead of more aircraft leads to lower noise levels, where adding a runway will cause a shift in the noise location.