Air Transport

"Green approaches" are to be introduced into Gothenburg-Landvetter airport following an agreement between Scandinavian airlines (SAS) and Sweden’s
airports operator and air traffic control provider, LFV, after years of flight trials at Stockholm-Arlanda.

Advanced continuous descent (A-CDA) - which green approaches are also known as - are optimised for 100kg (220lb) per approach fuel savings, which can
mean 314kg saved in CO2 emissions and 1.1kg in nitrogen oxide output.

The SAS-LVF multi-year programme collaboration, expected to continue up to 2011, will also see at Gothenburg-Landvetter time-based operations adopted for all traffic densities, along with aircraft speed co-ordination, to save fuel.

“The coming years at Arlanda the ambition is to introduce [time based operations] at all traffic densities,” says SAS captain Peter Larsson, the airline’s project manager for the research, which is being undertaken as part of the European Union’s North European ADS-B network Update Project (NUP)2+,
which is the extended second phase of NUP.

During the course of NUP2 and 2+ about 13,000 flights have been performed with communication between ATC and incoming aircraft’s flight management systems enabling aircraft generated estimated times of arrival for continuous descent approaches (CDA). Of these 13,000 flights about 6,000 have seen CDAs performed to achieve an idle approach from 10,000ft (3,050m). And about 1,900 flights have been performed as A-CDAs, with idle descent and approach from the cruising level.