Assessing Effects of Aircraft and Fuel Technology Advancement on Select Aviation Environmental Impacts

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Assessing Effects of Aircraft and Fuel Technology Advancement on Select Aviation Environmental Impacts

Moolchandani, Kushal

The ability to simultaneously assess airline operations, economics, and emissions would help evaluate the progress toward reduction of aviation’s environmental impact as outlined in the NASA Environmentally Responsible Aviation program. Furthermore, assessment of aircraft utilization by airlines would guide future policies and investment decisions on technologies most urgently required. This paper describes the development of the Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool, which is a computational simulation tool developed to assess the impact of new aircraft concepts and technologies on aviation’s impact on environmental emissions and noise. This tool uses an aircraft allocation model that represents the airlines’ profit-seeking operational decisions as a mixed-integer programming problem. The allocation model is embedded in a system-dynamics framework that mimics the economics of airline operations, models their decisions regarding retirement and acquisition of aircraft, and estimates market demand growth. This paper describes the development of Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool to use a single large airline to represent operations of all airlines in the United States aviation market. The paper also demonstrates Fleet-Level Environmental Evaluation Tool’s capabilities using scenarios on the assessment of effects of new technology aircraft and biofuels on aviation’s emissions.