Using Transponder Signals to Model Aircraft Performance at Non-Towered Airports

Aircraft performance modeling is critical for the assessment of safety and sustainability in general aviation. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) developed the Airport Environmental Design Tool, which uses flight data from radar and flight plans to model aircraft performance in space and time to further assess fuel consumption, emissions, noise, and air quality consequences. However, over 90% of 3,331 U.S. airports under the National Plan of Integrated Airport System (NPIAS) have limited access to air traffic data due to lack of air traffic control (ATC) facilities. Several methods have been developed and tested to capture aircraft activities at airports lacking fulltime personnel, such as video- and image-based detection, acoustic counter, statistical sampling, transponder signals-based method, etc. Most of these methods cannot be deployed on a large scale due either to high variation of accuracy or environmental/cost restrictions. The transponder signal-based method was validated as an accurate and reliable estimation of aircraft operations. Hence, this paper proposes a method to model aircraft performance using low-cost transponder receivers. First, ADS-B signals collected from aircraft are processed with a self-developed algorithm, and a 24-bit International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) code is extracted and applied to FAA databases to obtain fleet mix information such as aircraft type and engine type. Heuristics are then applied to model aircraft performance based on decoded parameters from ADS-B data. Data collected from Purdue University Airport (FAA code: LAF) were examined and analyzed using the proposed method, which will provide a cost-effective aircraft performance model for airport safety and sustainability assessment.