ANSPs, how changes on fuel price affect your airspace revenues?

AUTHOR: Luis Delgado

Vista allows to analyse complex scenarios with interactions between metrics of different stakeholders.

Flight plan generation and route selection

When airlines select their flight plans between a given origin and destination many different factors need to be considered, such as possible routes available, weather, aircraft performance or time required. Vista uses a data-driven approach analysing historical flight plans, routes between airports and aircraft performances to estimate the cost of operating those different routes.

As shown in the above diagram, the historical analysis of data allow us to generate a pool of two dimensional routes, probability distributions for cruise wind, speed and flight level request and length and duration of climb and descent phases. With this information, for each possible route we can estimate the 4D trajectories that the airline will plan and estimate the total operating cost of these possibilities.

A given flight will, of course, follow only one of the possibilities, so at pre-tactical level, the different flight plans options are prioritised considering their expected direct operating costs (as a function of flight time, fuel and en-route airspace charges). This selection is not deterministic as airlines not always will follow the apparent lest cost route and in Vista we are interested on reproducing realistic flight plan selections options, not the best option!

What if we change the cost of fuel?

Vista is a great tool to analyse the impact of changes of parameters such as fuel cost on the behaviour of the stakeholders in the system. In some areas of Europe, airlines face the possibility of selecting different routes which might incur on different airspace en-route charges and different fuel consumptions and flying time. This leads to trade-offs that can be captured by Vista. An example of one of those regions is western Europe and flights to-from the UK and the Canary Islands. As shown in this image, airlines can select more direct routes using the airspace of France, Spain and Portugal or operate longer routes which benefit from the low airspace usage cost of the Oceanic airspace.

The trade-offs between different metrics for the airlines can be explicitly computed by Vista as shown in the image below for different fuel price scenarios. With higher fuel cost, shorter routes tend to be selected leading to lower fuel usage but higher airspace en-route charges.

 

As Vista considers multiple stakeholders it is possible to assess the impact of these changes on the demand and expected revenue obtained by the different ANSPs as shown in the following images:

Expected revenue due to en-route charges variation for GCTS – EGKK flights

Expected revenue due to en-route charges variation for all of ECAC flights

The figure above shows the expected changes on revenues for the different ANSPs across Europe if changes of fuel price are produced. This illustrates how different parameters are interconnected for different stakeholders in subtle manners that can be captured by Vista: changes on fuel prices represent variations on routes preferences which might have an impact on airspace usage and revenues of the ANSPs!

Aviation