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Atlanta Airport’s Planes Are Taking Off Faster, Closer

April 22nd, 2015

More planes per hour are leaving from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

CREDIT DAN RABY / WABE

Atlanta is the first airport in the country where a new method for take-offs called Equivalent Lateral Spacing Operations, or ELSO, was approved. This means more planes per hour are leaving from Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.

There are five runways at the airport. At any given point, planes will take off from two or three of those runways at the same time.

“They’re all fanned out, kind of like spreading your fingers, if you will, on your hand,” Dennis Roberts, Regional Administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration’s Southern Region, said.

This is where the new ELSO technique comes in.

“What ELSO does now is like bringing your fingers together and being very precise that can assure the airplanes are going to be exactly down the center of your finger,” Roberts said.

With NextGen technology and a new procedure called ELSO, there are about eight more departures per hour at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. CREDIT COURTESY OF FAA

Before this technique, there had to be a 15-degree separation between airplanes during take-off. After almost a decade of safety studies and because of satellite technology installed on airplanes, that number was reduced to 10 degrees of separation. So that means at Hartsfield-Jackson International there are about eight additional departures every hour.

This translates to cost savings for airlines. Delta says it’s saving up to $18 million because of less time spent waiting on the runway, fuel savings and fewer missed connections.

In addition to ELSO’s help with departures, the airport has worked to make landings more efficient. A program called Wake RECAT (Wake Turbulence Recategorization) has been used at Hartsfield-Jackson since last summer. It reduces the required space behind planes as they land, to save time and fuel. The FAA will soon implement Wake RECAT at Charlotte-Douglas Airport, JFK, Newark Liberty, Chicago O’Hare, Midway, San Francisco, and George Bush Intercontinental and Hobby Airports in Houston.