Following the deployment of Pairwise Separation at Heathrow Airport in December, I sat with John Eden, Service Technical Expert for Traffic Synchronisation, and a key member of the project team, to discuss the intricacies involved, the challenges encountered, and how they were successfully overcome.

This week saw our third annual Intelligent Approach Customer Summit, with representatives from NAV CANADA and LVNL – as well as from ANSPs in Europe and the Middle East – joining us in our UK head office.

By dynamically calculating the spacing between aircraft based on real-time local conditions rather than relying on set distances, Intelligent Approach helps airports to maximise the capacity of their runways and optimise the flow of aircraft into the airport, thereby improving on-time performance.

Capacity for aircraft landing at Schiphol Airport during high wind conditions has increased by 3 – 6 additional aircraft per hour, per runway thanks to Intelligent Approach.

Back in 2019, we announced that we were working in partnership with Leidos and Canadian air traffic service provider, NAV CANADA, to deliver our Intelligent Approach tool for Toronto Pearson International Airport. But delivering a big project like this is never entirely straightforward and doing it during a global pandemic is even less so.

I’m finding in conversations with airport operations directors around the world, is that they’re looking at ways to enable future growth, but in a way that reflects our current reality.

With airports so impacted by the Covid crisis, tools like Intelligent Approach that help airports utilise runways and airspace more efficiently, for a fraction of the investment needed for new ground-based infrastructure, will be more valuable than ever to operators as traffic returns.

With airports so badly hit by the impact of the Covid crisis, being able to maximise the value and efficiency of existing assets – especially runways – is going to be of critical importance over the coming years as we begin to see traffic return.