Special issue: Selected papers from the Innovative Research Workshop 2010

Over nearly 10 years the Innovative Research Workshop and Exhibition held annually in early December at the EUROCONTROL Experimental Centre in Bretigny-sur-Orge, France, has brought together researchers and practitioners from air traffic management and related areas. The workshop focused specifically on innovative research and has continuously attracted inspiring new ideas, studies and concepts. The 2010 edition of the INO Workshop was a notable event (not least because snow kept the attendants locked into the centre one evening) and we have decided to dedicate a special edition of the Journal of Aerospace Operations to it. We have selected what we believe are the most interesting and innovative amongst the papers submitted for presentation at the conference and invited the authors to prepare an extended version of their original manuscript. There are seven articles in this edition which we are sure the reader will find stimulating and rewarding. “A quantitative exploration of flight prioritisation principles, using new delay costs” by Andrew Cook and Graham Tanner proposes a systematic approach to assessing the cost of delays for airlines and how these findings should be applied to flight prioritisation procedures instead of the simple application of delay minutes for optimisation purposes. “Analysis of the ecological and economic impact of a Single European Sky by simulating Freeflight trajectories with Lido/Flight” by Andreas Henn, Urban Weishaar and Philipp Bock proposes a method for quantifying the fuel saving potential of user preferred trajectories as compared to the present trajectories in the European airspace. The application of the flight planning software presently used by Lufthansa and several other airlines to a historic data set shows a fuel saving potential of more than 3% which translates to economic and ecological benefits alike. “4D trajectory management using Contract of Objectives” by Sandrine Guibert and Laurent Guichard describes a series of experiments carried out in order to assess the benefits and usability of the