New Way To Land Planes May Save Fuel

MICHELE NORRIS, host:

As fuel prices soar, the airline industry is trying to bring costs back down to Earth. Some airports are experimenting with a new landing maneuver. It's called a continuous descent. And if you're wondering, isn't that what planes do anyway, well, here's the difference. The new approach brings airplanes down in an angled, steady drop, as if moving down a ski slope or a ramp. Traditional landings use a more gradual, stair-step approach. UPS planes are testing this new technique at several airports, and it's also being used in Los Angeles at LAX and at London's Heathrow Airport. Alex Kingsbury wrote about continuous descent for the upcoming issue of U.S. News and World Report.

Mr. ALEX KINGSBURY (Writer): One way to think about this is sort of like an Easy Pass system at the toll booth. Basically, with the current toll system, you know, you have sort of cars stopped along the way as they move through the toll, and each pays and they go through. With continuous descent, it's a bit more like the Easy Pass. They just sort of gradually keep going and maintain their speed as they come right down and go through. So not to extend the analogy too far, but it basically keeps everything moving along, so it reduces some of the congestion in the skies and hopefully makes everything flow a little bit more smoothly.

NORRIS: Would passengers actually feel the difference if you're inside one of those planes?

Mr. KINGSBURY: Well, I've talked to some people who've ridden on this, and the answer is no, not really. I mean, your ears are still going to pop. But what you will notice is as the planes go down these gradual steps that you were talking about, the engines have to fire up and they push forward again, and it sort feels like a mini takeoff, if you will. With this it doesn't happen. The plane essentially stays in idle mode or in neutral as it coasts right down into the runway. So it's a much more gradual and continuous descent.

NORRIS: And as it coasts, how much fuel and how much money is saved using this process?

Mr. KINGSBURY: Well, it depends on the plane, obviously, but UPS has found that for their flights landing in Louisville, which is where they're testing this new system, they save about 50 gallons of jet fuel per landing. Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but the price of jet fuel is about $4 a gallon, and they're saving about $200 per flight. And it saves a lot. It also saves a lot of carbon dioxide, about 1,300 pounds per flight.

NORRIS: And in addition to fuel and carbon dioxide, it sounds like there are other benefits as well.

Mr. KINGSBURY: Well, one of the benefits that even non-fliers will see from this system is the noise reduction. This system reduces the noise output around these airports by about 30 percent per plane per landing.

NORRIS: So if there really are all these benefits, Alex, why are they just now switching to this new method? It seems like they would have done this years ago.

Mr. KINGSBURY: Well, the primary hurdle here is the cost, and it varies greatly depending on the airplane. For the larger planes, say a 747 or some of these cargo planes that UPS is using, it can run between $200,000 and $500,000 per plane to put all these new avionics on the actual airplane. So Congress and the airline industries are still debating over who's going to foot the bill for all this infrastructure.

NORRIS: And the avionics, you're actually talking about a GPS system, a global positioning system.

Mr. KINGSBURY: Exactly. Just like the little GPS units that you find in your car to do street maps. This is basically a little more advanced system that can actually pinpoint these airplanes in the air constantly, rather than radar, which is more generalized. It can't give you an exact position, but it comes pretty close. So this is a much more pinpoint, precise way of locating airplanes and locating the runway and bringing those two together.

NORRIS: So how much might this reduce flight delays?

Mr. KINGSBURY: Well, flight delays are a huge problem, especially given our current system. Frequent flyers will notice that a lot of times coming into a airport the airplane has to circle around as it waits for other planes to land. One thing to think about is that there's 7,000 airplanes aloft in the country, in the airspace at one - at any given time. And managing all those airplanes is incredibly time-consuming and labor-intensive. This system allows the planes to be a lot closer together in the skies and allows the air traffic controllers to sort of maneuver these airplanes around the flight corridors in a much more expedient manner.

NORRIS: Alex Kingsbury, thanks so much.

Mr. KINGSBURY: Thank you.

NORRIS: Alex Kingsbury is a writer for U.S. News and World Report. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.