Taxi Event Extraction from ASDE-X Surveillance for Surface Performance Evaluation

Unimpeded taxi times can be used to quantify a flight’s taxiing delay when compared with its actual taxi time. Currently, flight unimpeded taxi times are calculated by the Federal Aviation Administration using a regression method where flights in the Aviation System Performance Metrics (ASPM) data are clustered on the season of operation, airline, airport, and calendar year. It utilizes the airline-reported gate-Out, wheels-Off, wheels-On, gate-In (OOOI) times reported in ASPM, rounded to the nearest minute. For non-reporting airlines, these times are estimated from similar flights. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the unimpeded time using a surveillance-based approach by identifying the time a flight spent waiting in the system (i.e. traveling slower than 3 m/s) and comparing it to the total taxi time. This study specifically focuses on analyzing both arrivals and departures for 6 top U.S. airports (ATL, CLT, DEN, IAH, JFK, ORD) during the month of July 2015. Airport Surface Detection Equipment-Model X (ASDE-X) surveillance data was matched with ASPM data in order to have a complete coverage of the taxiing phase of airplanes between the gate and runway for taxi out and in procedures. Results show the benefits of a spatial analysis, which allows for a quick identification of which locations on the taxiways were the most susceptible to cause. This study also evaluates changes in the unimpeded metric when compared to the current method and other proposed methods, such as the 5th-to-15th clustering, that is present in literature.