Corporate responsibility for the U.S. Air Navigation Service Provider: A decision support tool to reduce CO2 emissions from en-route flights

Abstract

The rise in aviation-related emissions accompanying the increase in demand for air travel is raising concerns about aviation's impact on the climate. There is a growing public interest in climate change issues as a body of activists drives corporations to heed environmental concerns. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Air Navigation Service Provider (ANSP) for the U.S., controls the transit time for flights in its airspace, which is a major factor that determines the fuel burn and emissions produced. However, the FAA has no current system to estimate emissions from en-route operations, measure performance and set targets for improvement. The purpose of this paper is to provide the U.S. ANSP, the FAA, with a decision support tool to estimate the amount of CO2 emissions produced from en-route flights and analyze alternative routes to increase the ANSP's performance in regard to CO2 taking into consideration the workload of the air traffic controllers. The focus of the analysis is to reduce the flight transit time. The alternatives are Near Wind Optimal Routes (NWORs) for flights in one or more of the four distance categories of the baseline (Flights flying: less than 500, from 500 to 999, from 1000 to 1500 and greater than 1500 nautical miles). The tool, Aircraft Emissions Decision Support Tool (AEDST), is a deterministic model developed to calculate the fuel burn and emissions for any aircraft given the 4-D trajectory data (longitude, latitude, altitude, velocity, time) and the fuel burn rate per unit time at different phases of the flight. The Future Air Traffic Management Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET) was used to calculate the number of conflicts between flights, which represent the air traffic controllers' workload. The results show the improvement in the ANSP's performance by implementing NWORs for flight distances less than 1500 nautical miles by 19%, which provide the airlines with approximately $16M in fuel savings. Implementing those routes also reduces the workload of air traffic controllers by 2.5%.