The negative external impacts of aviation are currently under unprecedented scrutiny. In response, a number of studies into future prospects for improvement have recently been carried out. This paper reviews these studies and discusses their combined implications for emissions of carbon dioxide, oxides of nitrogen, and noise. The results are also compared with targets for emissions reduction proposed by ACARE and NASA. It is concluded that significant future gains are achievable, but not to the extent implied by the ACARE and NASA targets, which represent an unrealistically optimistic view of technological potential over the next 20-40 years. The focus on technological advance also deflects attention from the substantial benefits available from combining present-day technology with behavioural change. Finally, difficult policy decisions will be necessary; the greatest benefits are associated with technological developments that will require major, and long-term, investment for their realisation, and there will be increasing conflict between environmental and noise goals.

The Aviation Integrated Modelling project is developing a policy assessment capability to enable comprehensive analyses of aviation, environment and economic interactions at local and global levels. It contains a set of inter-linked modules of the key elements relevant to this goal. These include models for aircraft/engine technologies, air transport demand, airport activity and airspace operations, all coupled to global climate, local environment and economic impact blocks. A major benefit of the integrated system architecture is the ability to model data flow and feedback between the modules. Policy assessment can be conducted by imposing policy effects on the upstream modules and following implications through the downstream modules to the output metrics, which can then be compared to a baseline case. A case study involving different evolution scenarios of the US air transportation system from 2000 to 2030 is used to show the importance of feedback and to model a sample policy scenario in order to illustrate current capabilities.

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