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I was looking through the big book o' KBOS instrument procedures when I noticed that almost all of the airport's SIDs and STARs are marked "NOTE: For turbojets only" or some variation thereof:

  • Of the ten instrument departures, nine (BLZZR Five, BRUWN Six, CELTK Six, HYLND Six, LBSTA Seven, PATSS Six, REVSS Five, SSOXS Six, and WYLYY Five) are jet-only, with only one (LOGAN Four) allowing non-jet aircraft.
  • Of the six instrument arrivals, four (JFUND Two, NORWICH Seven, OOSHN Five, and ROBUC Three) are jet-only, with only two (GARDNER Four and WOONS Two) available for non-jets.

Why are most of KBOS's instrument-departure and instrument-arrival procedures prohibited for non-jet aircraft?

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    $\begingroup$ What kind of traffic does the airport serve? $\endgroup$
    – Michael Hall
    Mar 26 at 1:37
  • $\begingroup$ KBOS = Boston Logan International Airport $\endgroup$
    – Peter Mortensen
    Mar 30 at 20:20

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Performance.

And the fact that most of their traffic is jets.

The difference is, "jets" are pretty much all capable of accelerating quickly to 250 knots and climbing out expeditiously, and flying 250 knots until you want them to slow down on an arrival, and the design and use of these procedures works on the assumption that the traffic on them can all do this.

Having separate procedures for the non-jets ensures that you don't end up with a slower, lower-performing aircraft "clogging up the pipeline" -- they are assigned different procedures with different routes.

If the airport had a more equal mix of props and jets, you might see a more balanced ratio: a "jets" departure heading north, a non-jets departure heading north; a jets departure heading south, etc. But since Logan has comparatively few non-jet departures (not zero; Cape Air has some presence there), it's probably easiest just to have the props all get a single departure consisting mostly of radar vectors, and have the controllers get them pointed where they want to go while keeping them clear of the arrival/departure corridors in use. As opposed to designing a bunch of routes to accomplish that, which wouldn't be used all that often, as would be necessary if you had as many props-north / props-south / etc procedures as the jets do.

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