Operational and Environmental Assessment of the Electric Taxi based on Fast-time Simulation

Abstract

Economic pressure and increasing environmental awareness foster the development of new taxi operation technologies and procedures. One of the most promising developments is the use of electrically powered landing gears for medium-sized aircraft in civil aviation. Meeting the prerequisite that the weight of the new equipment and the weight of the saved fuel is approximately balanced, operational as well as economic and environmental benefits can be achieved. This paper describes the method how to assess these benefits by means of a fast-time simulation model and shows exemplary results for two airports. The first of these airports, Frankfurt (FRA), is one of the major European hub airports. Due to the higher share of heavy aircraft, which are assumed not to be equipped with an electrical landing gear, the relative benefit of almost 20% fuel savings is lower than at the second airport in the study, Berlin Brandenburg International (BER), the new capital airport, which is estimated to open in 2013. As the share of medium-sized aircraft is expected to be higher, relative fuel savings of more than 36% can be reached there. Besides of these economic and environmental impacts, also operational benefits can be observed as the aircraft can back out from their parking stands autonomously. By this the time-consuming coupling and decoupling of a pushback vehicle can be saved.