Brisbane Traffic Holding - A Joke

[Radi K]

Air schedules in chaos because Brisbane Airport's two runways can't operate at same time at night

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/q...-1226417242574

It's up to 60 minutes of airborne holding on clear weather nights in Brisbane.

Keep in mind, airports like Gatwick (with a similar mix of traffic) can operate with a movement cap of 55 per hour. Brisbane comes nowhere close to this.

We are talking about an airport with an ILS on each end and high speed taxiway exits.

Something has to be done.

[Steve Jones]

I totally agree with you Radi. As a very regular flyer to/from BNE for work, the holding is verging on the ridiculous, especially now that the days are shorter (to open a can of worms, if we got daylight savings in QLD, it would help a lot in summer...!)

The challenge I see is that there won't be a parallel runway for close to 10 years and with all the resource traffic expected over the next 2-3 years, the airport simply won't cope (not all of the mining ports can take larger aircraft, so you are talking high frequency Q400/ATR72 services to meet demand).

[lloyd fox]

I disagree with some things here Radi.

On Tuesday BNE handled a record 672 movements with 57 in the hour 9-10am albeit RWY 14 and 01 were both in use.

It is when RWY 19 is in use that traffic cannot land RWY 14 due to a incident and nobody is willing to take the risk.This is when most delays occur.

Today could possibly beat Tuesday's record .I have just come from there and 14 at the hold for RWY 19 and a constant non stop arrivals which is different to LGW because we have Caravans,Barons etc feeding into the sequence and i believe the ATC do a wonderful job.

Airlines will possibly add a further 30 movements a day by years end.

Now LGW handles around 250,000 movements annually which equates to 684 daily with busy days handling 750.

For the financial year 2010-2011 BNE handled 206,000 movements up from 194,000 the previous year.This financial year possibly 220,000 .

To put this into context now BNE handles 70-75% of Sydney movements with 1 runway quite a amount of the time.

[lloyd fox]

Actually i just read the article and i am not sure where they got the daily movements from as those daily figures are 15 years ago.

This week Monday 647
Tuesday 672 and Wed 645.

[Joe Frampton]

I live under the YBBN 01 approach at Norman Park on the southside. There are certainly periods on some days where the aircraft are on a constant line up from late afternoon well into the evening. But I've also been to Gatwick, where they seem to handle far more traffic on one runway without too many problems. I'm no expert on this, but our aircraft separation & stacking seem (visually) very conservative compared to say Gatwick or LAX, where you can see the approach lights stacked up on levels and they seem to get plenty of planes on the ground... Are we really a 2 runway city?

[lloyd fox]

Yes Joe we are.

As i said before when RWY 01 is the active then 14 or 32 are also in use.You get maybe 60% traffic over your area.

This am between 9am-10am 56 movements.

[Radi K]

I’m sorry Lloyd but I can promise you the holding requirements imposed at Brisbane are very dissimilar to most major international airports. 60 minutes of airborne holding for a fine weather evening shows poor planning from BAC. A slot system needs to be implemented without delay to ensure passengers and airlines can plan accordingly. Baron’s/Caravans etc might be in the mix but the airport is over promising and under delivering.

This morning with the 56 movements only 20 minutes of airborne holding was required at most. So if you can explain why night after night we are seeing 45-60 minutes of aircraft flying around in circles, I would love to hear it. I trust your experience with airport and the movement numbers you have mentioned but we are nowhere near the efficiency of other well-known one-runway international airports.

For the record, last night it was 60 minutes of holding between 1930 and 2200 local.

Tonight it’s 45 from 1730-2200.

[Chris W]

While Brisbane won't be getting a slot system, Collaborative Decision Making via the Metron Traffic System should be implemented sometime in 3rd Qtr 2012 to bring it into line with Sydney and Perth. There were some figures being thrown around that during the first few weeks of its implementation in Sydney, airborne holding was halved (bear in mind that is talk and not confirmed).

However, anyone operating into Sydney since it went live in March would know the system works quite well. It isn't perfect but it is a lot better than the old CTMS system when everyone abides by the delay program.

[Mick F]

Being directly affected by the delays into Brisbane (those who know my background know that I know the holding pattern at Maleny quite well), and having a fairly good knowledge as to the reasons for delays etc., I can pretty well assure you that given the resources ATC has, they do a pretty bloody good job at maximising the runway useage at peak times.

What a lot don't seem to think about, when they see big delays between arrivals during these peak periods, is that you have to squeeze the departures in there as well!

14/32 is not 'closed' at night, and where opportunities exist for ATC to use 14, they will use it (I know, because we are the one's often put onto it). However, the use of 19 pretty much precludes it's use at all during peak times, and during peak times it's also hard to utilise it when 01 is in use as well. Not impossible, but you need just the right sized gap.

14/32 will be closed later this year for about a 6-9 month period, to enable the commencement of works for the new runway, so it's only going to get worse. However, there's not a lot that can be done!

We are talking about an airport with an ILS on each end and high speed taxiway exits.

ILS approaches only make it worse.

As Chris has said, there is something being done behind the scenes, but the Courier Mail wouldn't put anything like that into their story, otherwise it wouldn't sound as bad as they've made out.

Mick

[lloyd fox]

There is a very good discussion about this on Pprune at the moment and whether i am right or wrong all i know is the ATC hands are controlled by the incident mentioned.

BNE has had a massive increase in movements the past 2 months and anyone who follows my Jetspotter posts can read that info at anytime.

BNE movements will get a further 30-40 a day weekdays before the year ends and as Mick says things will get worse.

We are now busier than Melbourne on aircraft movements and yesterday was also a new record.

Yes Mick is absolutely correct they have to sequence the arrivals to let the departures go.
Yesterday 9am-10 am peak 56 movements.14 at the hold and a constant 2-3 on finals for 2 hours.Only 1 landed 14, a Dornier 228, everything else landed 19 and all takeoffs were 19.
250 movements between 6am and noon.