Safety Studies of Reducing minimum Radar Separation for high Performing Airport Operations

The continued growth of the air traffic demand leads the aviation community to explore new means to increase the capacity of the whole system. One of the main obstacles is the surveillance technology standards that were not changed for decades and seems to be very conservative. The SESAR2020 [1] Project EnhAnced Runway THrouput (EARTH) tackles this problem in its solution 3 "Reducing Minimum Radar Separation (MRS) based on Required Surveillance Performance (RSP)" by redefining the standards and put on place new requirements for the surveillance performance that allow reduction in the radar separation. The main challenge is to prove that reducing the radar separation will keep the operation safe with an increasing of the runway throughput. For this reason, Real Time Simulations covering Safety and Human Performance in terms of workload and situation awareness were conducted at EUROCONTROL. In this paper, we provide the results of the Real Time Simulations, we study the impact of the reduction in term of loss of separation and numbers of go-round.