Schiphol Airport has to cope with a passenger demand that will double over the next 20 years. In reaction to this growth Schiphol is designing new and redesigning existing piers to increase its capacity. Besides expanding and rebuilding the apron area, more efficient ways of handling passenger
air traffic movements are currently under development to cope with a future capacity problem. The overall aim of Schiphol in this context is to make its apron capacity as efficient as possible. The pushback phase can be seen as an opportunity to address this. One way to achieve a higher static apron capacity is reducing the pushback wingtip clearance, which can only be done when the
pushbacks at Schiphol are executed accurately. This report investigates if an increase in static apron capacity is feasible by wingtip clearance reductions to achieve a categorical upgrade. To acquire the knowledge how accurate the pushbacks are executed, aircraft transponder data will be analyzed. Using cubic spline interpolation, the pushback movements are reconstructed to calculate the spread of the tracks. The spread of the pushback tracks gives an indication of the accuracy. The results are compared to the acceptable level of safety and verify if a categorical upgrade is possible. The factors that cause the spread of the movements are determined by analyzing the current pushback procedures and the day-to- day operations.