Study on the Cause of Air Traffic Delay in Fukuoka Approach Control Area Using CARATS Open Data

Fukuoka Airport is one of the local airports in Japan but has been the busiest airport using a single runway in Japan. After the COVID-19 pandemic, congestion is predicted to increase again, and some solutions are required to mitigate the congestion not only for time and energy but also for environmental reasons. Approach air traffic controllers often use the method “radar vector” to make proper separations among air traffic. The extra distance flown by the airliners due to the radar vector tends to become longer as the number of traffic increases. The construction of an additional parallel runway is planned as one of the solutions, however, the simultaneous approach and departure using two runways will not be permitted under the current regulation because the lateral distance between the two runways is not large enough. Therefore, it is still important to make proper separations among traffic in the approach control area as in a single runway operation. In this paper, the situations of the air traffic in the Fukuoka approach control area from 2012 to 2020 are analyzed first, and the causes of the congestion are analyzed using multiple regression methods.