Analysis of potential implementations of pushback control at LaGuardia Airport

Implementations of surface traffic management strategies at congested airports have the potential to yield significant benefits, but must account for the constraints and objectives of multiple stakeholders. This paper considers the implementation of a pushback rate control strategy at LaGuardia airport in New York. This class of control policies regulates departure pushback rates by holding aircraft at their gates during congested periods, in a manner that maintains the departure throughput of the airport. The pushback rate control strategy accounts for gate conflicts that occur between departures held at the gate and arrivals assigned to those gates, by releasing the departures when the corresponding arrivals land. Another practical concern that arises at congested airports is that of long gate-holds, which can be inconvenient to air carriers. To this end, the authors analyze the distribution of gate-hold times that would be expected at LaGuardia airport, and explore potential implementations of a pushback rate control policy in which gate-holds would be limited to a maximum of 10 minutes and 15 minutes. The results show that although the total benefits decrease with these constraints, significant reductions in taxi-out times are still possible, and the resultant policies maintain both efficiency (that is, gate-hold times translate to taxi-out time reductions) and fairness (that is, the share of taxi-out savings received by an airline is approximately the share of departures operated by the airline).