Statistics of the Approach Process at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport

Dealing with uncertainty is a necessary and difficult aspect in operations analysis of complex systems such as the air transportation system. We represent these uncertainties in the approach process by probability distributions. This paper provides statistical observations of the approach and landing process at Detroit Metropolitan airport (DTW) for one week of February 2003. These probability distributions are based on aircraft track record data at DTW which are collected by a multilateration surveillance system. After explaining characteristics of the database and its short comings, we present a methodology to extract necessary statistical samples. From this, we obtain appropriate probability distributions for landing time interval (LTI), inter arrival distance (IAD), and runway occupancy time (ROT) presented under instrument flight rules (IFR) and peak traffic periods.