Minimizing contrail formation by rerouting around dynamic ice-supersaturated regions

Abstract

Today, the European airspace is already faced with airspace capacity constraints, especially during business driven peak periods of the day in central European air traffic control sectors. This capacity bottleneck will cause a challenging number of severe difficulties in future flight planning and airport ground handling. Additionally, the growing public awareness and the increasing scientific knowledge of the aviation environmental impact urges air traffic stakeholders to reduce the aviation induced global warming to an acceptable level. These efforts should include both the prevention of unnecessary fuel burn due to detours and the avoidance of passing ice-supersaturated regions during cruise to prevent contrail formation. Therewith, conflicting goals have to be considered in trajectory optimization. The induced contrails influence the radiation budget of the Earth atmosphere, which depend on the dynamic size and location of the ice-supersaturated regions. However, contrail avoidance can lead to unsolvable high requirements on airspace capacity in dry and warm air spaces, where contrails are not induced. Furthermore, contrail avoidance procedures can lead to large detours, which in turn cause more fuel burn and an increased impact on the environment due to the emission of additional radiative active substances. In this paper, the Air Traffic Control Fast Time Simulator and Air Traffic Optimizer AirTOp is used to simulate one day of Europeans air traffic and to reduce the radiative forcing of contrails by minimizing the number of flight hours through dynamic ice-supersaturated regions. Rerouting the affected flights does this, so that separation requirements are still fulfilled and each aircraft still reaches its destination. In this paper the following measures are assessed without and with contrail involved rerouting: the decrease of airspace capacity, the additional distance flown, the additional fuel burn and the contrail induced environmental impact. We found, that rerouting on this special day would have caused higher additional fuel and time costs, than saved reduced contrail costs.

Beyond Contrail Avoidance: Efficacy of Flight Altitude Changes to Minimise Contrail Climate Forcing

“…Hence, ATM considerations could limit the scale and effectiveness of any proposed diversion strategy. However, most studies have not accounted for these unintended consequences, apart from Grewe et al [48] and Rosenow et al [49] which both specified the minimum separation standards as a constraint in optimising flight trajectories.…”

“…The percentage differences in these aggregated metrics from the various vertical flight diversion strategies (see Section 2.4) are shown in Table 1 and Figure 1. In general, the choice of strategy leads to different efficacies in mitigating the contrail climate forcing: minimising the initial contrail length (contrail avoidance) or the RF', commonly adopted by previous studies [11,[44][45][46][47][48][49] For all five strategies, the percentage of flights that are selected for diversion (ranging between 7.6% and 20.1%) is significantly larger than the small-scale diversion strategy proposed in our earlier study [28] (up to 1.7% of all flights). This is because the earlier study [28] investigated a strategy of diverting the 2% of flights that contribute to 80% of the total EF contrail , while the search space in this study is larger and considers alternative trajectories for all flights to minimise the selected objective function.…”

Weather Impact on Airport Performance

“…Current research in the field of flight and airport operations addresses economic, operational and ecological efficiency [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. As presented above, the propagation of delay in the network is paramount when assessing the impact of congestion [23,24].…”

Advancements in Passenger Processes at Airports from Aircraft Perspective

“…Current research in the field of air traffic management primarily addresses the economic and ecological impact of flight trajectories (cf. [10][11][12][13]) but has to include efficient aircraft ground operations as well in order to ensure an efficient aircraft trajectory over the day of operations [14]. In this context, research was conducted with regards to the turnaround performance implementing collaborative management [15] or addressing the future airport performance [16].…”