New RWY 07L/25R in EDDF starting 21OCT11

[Badente]

A short personal heads up for all airmen operating into Frankfurt: Be advised they're opening a new 2800m/~9180ft landing only RWY in FRA/EDDF. It will allow for independent parallel operation.

Future RWY assignment depends on the direction you're coming from. Northern traffic will be assigned to new RWY07L/25R, southern traffic to RWY07R/25L. RWY07C/25C will almost exclusively be used for departing traffic.

Restrictions: The new RWY is only usable for traffic up to A346.
B747, A380 & all noise cat F (e.g. AN124) are not allowed to use 07L/25R due political reasons. The MD11 might get in trouble with the LDA. Those will be assigned RWY 07R/25L. Additionally, RWY 07R/25L can be assigned to all other traffic for load balancing reasons between the two arrival RWYs.

There are published transitions to transfer you from the north to the south & vice versa. Published transition length is up to 72NM longer than before.


RWY 07C & 07R Transitions RWY 25C & 25L Transitions
------------------------- -------------------------
UNOKO +63NM UNOKO ± 0NM
ROLIS +72NM ROLIS + 8NM
KERAX +27NM KERAX +30NM
PSA ± 0NM PSA ± 0NM


Taxi times are expected to rise by seven to ten minutes due to the location of the new RWY.

In my opinion the bottleneck is shifted from arrival to departure as especially the new 25C departures are now dependent on 25R & 25L missed approaches and 18 departures.

Take a close look at your publications and your flight plan mileage! Interesting weeks ahead ...

[eagleflyer]

I´m curious how the whole thing is going to work. I´m convinced customers will complain about the strange inbound transitions at low altitudes instead of a pattern or two at higher levels. Also people on the ground will just love the low downwinds 20 miles away from the airfield.
I also see the main bottleneck at the departure end. There are so many dependencies between the different runways, inbound traffic and SIDs that it will be difficult to always comply to all restrictions.

I think theoretically the new runway will increase the capacity to more than 120 movements per hour, but the noise abatement regulations will make it hard to exceed 100/h.