Development of Flight Inefficiency Metrics for Environmental Performance Assessment of ATM

Air traffic management has a fundamentally important role in reducing the environmental impacts of air transportation by reducing the inefficiencies in the paths flown by aircraft. The potential causes of flight inefficiency are discussed in this paper, followed by the development of flight inefficiency metrics based on lateral track extension and fuel burn to quantify the environmental performance of the system. These metrics are used with flight data to illustrate their utility. Lateral flight inefficiency metrics are found to be easy to compute and compatible with current surveillance technologies, but they do not allow some important environmental performance characteristics to be captured. Fuel-based metrics are found to be far more effective in this regard, but suffer from significantly greater complexity in their implementation. The implications of the analyses for future ATM evolution strategies are discussed to show the insights that can be gained from this type of analysis. Keywords—flight inefficiency metrics; environmental impacts; air traffic management.