[narrator] Air travel has changed a great deal since the 1950s.
Jetliner technology has improved dramatically.
Many more cities are connected, and the number of flights per day has skyrocketed.
The air traffic management system, however, is essentially the same,
and while the air traffic control system remains extremely safe,
it is unnecessarily inefficient and a source of noise and delays.
That's why Boeing has developed a new solution
that could save billions of gallons of fuel every year,
reduce noise around airports, and help ensure more on-time arrivals.
It's called "Tailored Arrivals."
Depending on the aircraft type,
[Suzanne Hawkins, Systems Engineer, Boeing Research and Technology]
our trials have shown that tailored arrivals can save
between 400 to 800 pounds of fuel per arrival.
[narrator] That translates into 58-116 gallons for every landing.
With more than 30,000 flights everyday in the United States alone,
the potential savings per year are enormous.
[Hawkins] As an analogy, tailored arrivals would be like taking a ramp to get down to the ground
rather than taking the stairs and slowly descending in steps.
Air traffic controllers usually direct the aircraft down through several altitude levels
in a stairstep approach to the runway.
This requires pilots to power up engines after reaching each successive step.
With a tailored arrival, an aircraft is guided by computers to smoothly glide from top of descent
directly to the airport runway for landing.
This allows the aircraft to descend continuously at low engine power.
[Hawkins] The computers on the airplane know the most efficient path to take,
so when we can let the airplane do that, we can end up saving fuel.
[narrator] When you cut fuel use, you also cut greenhouse gases.
If the tailored arrival system were fully implemented around the globe,
it could reduce CO2 emissions by billions of tons per year.
That's like taking hundreds of thousands of cars off the road.
[Hawkins] In addition to fuel savings and reducing carbon emissions,
tailored arrivals also reduce workload to the pilot and controller,
and they reduce the flight duration, so that can help improve on-time arrivals.
[narrator] The world has been using an air traffic control system designed in the 1950s.
It's been a remarkably effective system over the decades,
but it wasn't designed to save fuel, reduce noise, and help ensure more on-time arrivals
at today's busier airports.
That's our challenge now, a challenge being met with tailored arrivals.
[Boeing] [Copyright @ 2012 Boeing. All rights reserved.]