Studying the Impacts of the reduction of Minimum Radar Separation on Approach and Tower ATCOs using EUROCONTROL Real Time Simulators

One of the main reason of the long waiting on holding of aircrafts approaching big airport is the lack of capcity due to the runway utilization constraints for separation. To increase the runway throughput different solutions are studied under the SESAR2020 EnhAnced Runway THrouput (EARTH) project [1] such as pair wise separation (PWS), wether dependent separation (WDS), Increase Glide Slope (IGS) to Second Runway Aiming Point, prediction of runway occupancy time (ROT) and Reduction of the Minimum Radar Separation (MRS) based on the required Surveillance Performance (RSP). To validate the different concepts and the impacts of the different solutions on Air Traffic Controllers (ATCOs), EUROCONTROL airport team developed a real time simulator tool called LORD (Leading Optimised Runway Delivery tool) integrated to its real time simulators for Approach and Airport. In this paper we present the solution consisting on reducing the current minimum radar separation , we detail the results of the real time simulation conducted on the approach and Tower environment of Vienna (Austria) with the participations of their Air Trffic Controllers, we discuss the impacts of the reduction on the Air Traffic Controller Workload and Situation Awareness and we provide the limitation and constraints to apply a reduction of the MRS.