Observed impact of traffic and weather on continuous descent and continuous climb operations

This paper presents an assessment of the impact of traffic and weather on the likelihood of executing continuous descent operations (CDO) and continuous climb operations (CCO) in a busy multi-airport system. Our analysis of empirical data available for the Houston Metroplex region indicates that increased traffic levels and the presence of traffic management initiatives related to either congestion or weather tend to decrease the likelihood of flights executing both continuous descent and continuous climb operations. The extent to which arrival or departure procedures were used remained the same between flights executing CDOs (or CCOs) and all other flights. We demonstrate this by the use of scatter plots and logistic regression.