No abstract

Airport surface congestion results in significant increases in taxi times, fuel burn and emissions at major airports. This paper describes the field tests of a congestion control strategy at Boston Logan International Airport. The approach determines a suggested rate to meter pushbacks from the gate, in order to prevent the airport surface from entering congested states and to reduce the time that flights spend with engines on while taxiing to the runway. The field trials demonstrated that significant benefits were achievable through such a strategy: during eight four-hour tests conducted during August and September 2010, fuel use was reduced by an estimated 12,250-14,500 kg (4,000-4,700 US gallons), while aircraft gate pushback times were increased by an average of only 4.4 minutes for the 247 flights that were held at the gate.

In response to strong growth in air transportation CO 2 emissions, governments and industry began to explore and implement mitigation measures and targets in the early 2000s. However, in the absence of rigorous analyses assessing the costs for mitigating CO 2 emissions, these policies could be economically wasteful. Here we identify the cost-effectiveness of CO 2 emission reductions from narrow body aircraft, the workhorse of passenger air transportation. We find that in the US, a combination of fuel burn reduction strategies could reduce the 2012 level of CO 2 emissions per passenger-km by around 2% per year through mid-century. These intensity reductions would occur at zero marginal costs for oil prices between $50-100 per barrel. Even larger reductions are possible, but could impose extra costs and require the adoption of biomassbased synthetic fuels. The extent to which these intensity reductions will translate into absolute emissions reductions will depend on fleet growth.

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.