Air ground collaboration through delegated separation: Application for departures and arrivals

Delegated separation is an air traffic management capability in which responsibility for separation from one or more aircraft is assigned to the flight crew by an air traffic controller, in specific tactical situations, to improve operational efficiency in the National Airspace System (NAS). In this human-in-the-loop (HITL) simulation, 8 airline pilots flew departure and arrival scenarios while using a cockpit display of traffic information to maintain separation from a lead airplane. Pilots reported that workload for the departure and arrival tasks was well within acceptable limits and that they would be willing to perform this task with the CDTI as implemented in this study. Objective spacing performance showed reduced spacing compared to the baseline condition where controllers retained separation responsibility. The observed baseline and delegated separation spacing distributions were applied to a fast time simulation to estimate the departure throughput benefit that may result from the application of these procedures. The estimated improvement in arrival rate was about 3 per hour for single runway arrivals, and NN about 4 per hour for single runway departures. Implications for NextGen operational improvement are discussed.