New method to compute the missed approach fuel consumption and its emissions

Abstract

The aeronautical industry has set for itself important environmental goals, creating the need of improved tools for measuring the polluting emissions generated by fuel burn. This paper describes a new method to estimate the fuel burn and the pollution generated by a landing approach and also for a missed approach procedure. Fuel emission estimations can be used to compare the costs of different routes. The method developed in this paper uses the Emissions Guide Book developed by the European Environment Agency as the needed database for the computations. This method gives estimations of the fuel burn and emissions, including the amounts of CO, NOx, HC, EICO, EINOx and EIHC for a given flight as its output. The flight computation is divided into two sections: one section for the aircraft's travelled distance and a second section for the time an aircraft flies under certain flight modes. Since this method computes the missed approach fuel and emissions contribution, it computes the burn for a given descent approach for a successful landing, as well as for the same descent approach with a missed approach procedure followed by a successful landing. These two landings are verified in a complete flight to study the missed approach contribution for a conventional mid-range flight. The results show that a descent with the missed approach procedure requires 5.7 times more fuel than a normal, successful descent. This extra fuel burn increases the pollution released to the atmosphere and would impact the airlines’ profit margin due to the added fuel costs and longer flight times, as well as any future economic measures imposed on the increased air and noise pollution.

Determination of the flight trajectory in terms of emission and fuel consumption minimization

“…Ref. 14. In this work, based on the collected test data, the flight trajectory was determined so that the impact on the environment was as low as possible.…”

3D Cruise Trajectory Optimization Inspired by a Shortest Path Algorithm

“…Savings of 2 million gallons of fuel have been reported in Los Angeles per year [5] and of 36 gallons of fuel per flight in Atlanta [6]. The Top of Descent (ToD) coordinates must be computed correctly [7,8] while executing this procedure in order to avoid complications and the resulting need to execute further procedures such as missed approach, which are expensive in fuel burn terms as well as being costly in time and the associated airport complications [9,10].…”

Horizontal flight trajectory optimization considering RTA constraints

“…A descent procedure called a Continuous Descent Approach (CDA) was developed. Nevertheless, care must be given to correctly compute the beginning of descent location point to avoid missing the descent leading to a missed approach, which according to [7] it is expensive in terms of fuel consumption. The CDA technique has been implemented at different airports and gave good results [8][9][10][11].…”