Assessing the Potential Benefit of Future Technologies to Reduce the Environmental Impact of Airport Operations

Abstract

Environmental performance of the air transportation system plays an important role to ensure the anticipated growth in air traffic. This is particularly the case for the environmental impact of airports on a local level. Beside the technical capacity, environmental capacity might noticeably constrain airports in the future. In addition to aircraft noise and its impact on the community, emissions of airport operations and the corresponding impact on local air quality have to be considered, given the negative e�ects of constrained infrastructure and increasing demand for air tra�c on overall performance (e.g. increasing delay). In this paper technologies to reduce environmental impact of airport operations are introduced together with a modeling approach to assess their future impact on emission reduction. Based on the large amount of emissions during the taxi phases we focus on approaches to reduce taxi emissions. The potential fuel savings and emission reductions are exemplary computed for a hub airport for the investigation period 2010-2030.