EVALUATION OF OPERATIONS ON AN AIRPORT WITH A CIRCULAR RUNWAY

This paper presents an innovative concept for airport operations in the long-term future, based on a radically new airport design encompassing a circular circumventing runway. The Endless Runway project, mostly funded by the European Commission during the Framework Programme 7 (FP7), aims at evaluating the benefits and identifying the constraints associated to this kind of airport. The possibility to operate the airport whatever the wind direction and for every aircraft type, the optimization of air and ground aircraft trajectories through the use of the best runway section, as well as the compact airport footprint are part of the observed gains. Those must be balanced with the high runway construction cost, additional safety issues in gusty winds and the impossibility to extend the runway system if additional capacity is desired. A foreseen application could be a small airport dedicated to unmanned aircraft operations or a large hub airport with limited traffic mix and high reliability of operations.