Smooth aircraft approach

[Jellied Eels]

Recent article in the New Scientist: "Smooth aircraft approach cuts noise pollution"

" . . . Lining up with the runway as far as 70 kilometres away and making a steady descent can more than halve the acoustic energy that reaches the ground, an international research consortium has found.

Now pressure is on for the technique to be considered for the busiest international airport in the world, Heathrow, in London, UK."

Is it true that it's being considered, and what effect might it have on London flightpaths?

Link to article (http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994395)

[Jerricho]

This report was doing the rounds a couple of months ago.

At Heathrow, we do all we can to ensure "continuous descent" approaches, which are one of our key performance indicators, especially during the night. The CDA is mainly applicable below 6000', and inside 20nm from touchdown at night, but carriers like BA and Virgin do make notable efforts all the way in. We also at night (after 1100 local) ensure aircraft don't join final approch inside 10nm and are not below 3000' at this point. Ideally at night, we do vector traffic straight in where possible, but the continuous descent can be effected by EGSS and EGLC departures to the SE.

While the "pressure" may be on, with the current Terminal airspace structure, I really can't see it being feasible. Our STAR sturucture also wouldn't be compatible; with the location of the holds if we took the example of LHR landing 09, while aircraft straight in from the west could be positioned for such an approach, the facilitation traffic from LAM (which is the busiest arrival) would kind of defeat the purpose without running traffic loads of miles upwind, something I'm sure the operators would love.

There is also the issue of "protected ranges" of the localiser and glide path, with the possibility of false indications at those sort of ranges.

[Spodman]

Heard a similar thing being spoken about here, but the Lining up with the runway bit is a furphy, who cares what his heading is? The aim is let the pilot shut the throttles with a reasonably-known number of track miles to go, and not open them again for circuit dicking about or off-profile arrival requirements.

Of course they don't want to inconvenience the profiles of departures either, so more "clever" tools needed.