| Resumo : |
In order to increase arrival rates at many of today's heavily congested airports, simultaneous approaches are conducted on parallel runways. For many years, the FAA has permitted simultaneous independent instrument approach operations only for those parallel runways with a minimum separation of 4300 feet. Nowadays, new criteria have been developed to increase the utilization on those runways, where the most recent procedures, called PRM/SOIA (Precision Runway Monitor/Simultaneous Offset Instrument Approach), make simultaneous approaches possible in systems of runways spaced as close as 750 feet. On October 26, 2004, San Francisco International Airport (SFO) implemented this new landing system (PRM/SOIA), allowing the airport to increase the capacity of runways in inclement weather conditions by as much as twenty-five percent. This research analyzes these simultaneous approaches procedures in closely-spaced runways, addressing the potential benefits of the implementation of PRM/SOIA at São Paulo/Guarulhos Aeroporto Internacional Governador André Franco Montoro (GRU) with a computer simulation tool, and also the influence of this implementation at other airports inside the same terminal airspace. The results show that this implementation provides decreases in the total airborne flight delays between 45 and 51%, regarding all the instrumental traffic at the terminal airspace analyzed (i.e. the traffic of three airports inside the São Paulo Terminal Area with IFR procedures). We also find an increase of 18% in the arrivals capacity of the TMA-SP by 18%, approximately. However, isolated analysis shows small increases in delays in departure procedures (ground queue) and also for the airborne flight delays at a specific airport (RAMS Plus and ATM Analyzer utilization in this study is in accordance with the Academic Software License Agreement granted by ISA Software Ltd. to ITA). |