Performance Assessment of Operations in the North Atlantic Organized Track System and Chicago O'Hare International Airport Noise Study

This thesis consists of two topics. The first topic is a performance assessment study of the flight operations in the North Atlantic Organized Track System. This study begins with the demand shortfall analysis of demand sets provided by the Federal Aviation Association (FAA). These sets were used to simulate OTS traffic for a number of scenarios that consider different separation minima. For this reason, algorithms were developed to modify the NAT OTS configuration applying reduced lateral separation between tracks and estimate the probability that any given flight that traverses the Atlantic will use the OTS. The preliminary results showed that the scenario with reduced lateral separation minimum (RLatSM) (25 nm) and the reduced longitudinal separation minimum (RLongSM) (8 nm) was the most optimal among all five that were simulated. The application of RLatSM also decrease the mean fuel consumption of flights that shift from traversing the OTS to flying random routes. The second topic is a noise study performed for the Chicago O'Hare International Airport. The contributions to this topic were three fold: 1) we analyzed data to understand the current operations at ORD airport 2) we verified the noise contours produced in 2002 by the FAA, Chicago Department of Aviation (CDA) and the engineering contractors 3) we produced noise contours for today's airport activity.