Energy Efficient Contrail Mitigation Strategies for Reducing the Environmental Impact of Aviation

The main goal of Air Traffic Management (ATM) is to enable safe operation of air traffic while accommodating the demand and doing it efficiently with minimum disruption to schedules. The impact of aircraft emissions on the environment adds an additional dimension to the planning of aircraft operations. This paper describes a new simulation capability to analyze the relationship between air traffic operations and their impact on the environment. This is the first simulation to integrate all air traffic in the US based on flight plans, aircraft trajectory calculations based on predicted wind data, contrail calculations based on predicted temperature and humidity data, a common metric to combine the effects of different types of emissions, and algorithms to generate alternate trajectories for aircraft traveling between city-pairs. The integrated simulation is used to evaluate the energy efficiency of contrail reduction strategies. The aircraft trajectories are varied from their baseline flight plans to reduce contrails in three different ways: changes to altitude, optimal changes to planned route, and three-dimensional change of trajectory. The method is applied to three different scenarios: (a) a single flight between a city-pair, (b) all flights between 12 city- pairs, and (c) all flights in the US airspace. Results for the 12 city-pairs show that contrail reduction involving horizontal route change only is not fuel efficient, the three- dimensional trajectory change produces the best results at a computational cost, and changes to the altitude only produces good results as well as the ability to add airspace capacity constraints. For the scenario of all flights in the US airspace, initial results based on one month data show that contrail reduction strategies involving altitude changes applied to medium and long-range flights on days with high-contrail activity provide the maximum environmental benefit for a small reduction in energy efficiency.

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