Efficient evaluation of measures for air traffic climate optimization

Abstract

We present an efficient methodology for evaluating measures for climate optimizing air traffic. In this context we use an integrated simulation framework which allows assessment and optimization of operational concepts with respect to overall mean climate impact and costs on a per route basis for a global route network. The CATS simulation chain considers flight plans with city pairs, aircraft fleet composition, resulting aircraft movements, and trajectories to compute the changes in climate impact and direct operating costs. The simulation chain was applied to systematically quantify the potential for climate impact reduction and related cost changes through changed cruise flight altitudes and speeds. The simulated global route network comprises all routes served by the selected aircraft type (A330-200) in the year 2006, resulting in 1178 city pairs worldwide. For calculating the climate impact of aviation it is important to consider the effect of so-called non-CO2 emissions beside the climate effect of carbon dioxide emissions. As the impact of these non-CO2 emissions strongly depends on the location of the emission, the climate impact is no longer proportional to the total amount of emissions. Therefore it is necessary to use an efficient model like AirClim which considers the impact of different climate agents as well as their geographically variable impact for calculating the climate impact of aviation emissions. This simulation shows that it would be possible to reduce the climate impact by more than 60% by changing the flight altitude and speed, leading to an increase in direct operating costs by 32% compared to cost optimized flight altitude and speed. A one percentage increase in direct operating cost can result in a 12% reduction in climate impact.