Interference Liability of a civil Air to Air refueling Traffic Network

Kurzfassung

The project REsearch on a CRuiser Enabled Air Transport Environment (RECREATE) is about the introduction and airworthiness of cruiser-feeder operations for civil aircraft. Cruiser-feeder operations are investigated as a promising pioneering idea for the air transport of the future. The top level objective of the project is to demonstrate on a preliminary design level that cruiser-feeder operations (as a concept to reduce fuel burn and CO2 emission levels) can be shown to comply with the airworthiness requirements for civil aircraft. (The 42-month RECREATE project research receives funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284741. This publication reflects only the authors' views. The European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.) Air-to-air refuelling operations are an example of this concept. Currently Air-to-air refuelling operations are primary used to extend range of aircrafts in military operation. However some research has been done in the past to estimate fuel saving capabilities of air-to-air refuelling in both military and civil operations. Most of these estimations give highly positive results on the fuel saving capabilities. Nevertheless these results mainly based on a small number of optimised cases. As part of the primary design in the RECREATE project this paper will discuss air-to-air refuelling operations in a traffic scenario based on Eurocontrol-Data containing one day of traffic over Europe. With this traffic two main scenarios have been created. The first contains traffic between Europe and America while the other one contains traffic between Europe and Asia. The traffic scenarios used in the paper will exchange current flights due flight with air to air refuelling somewhere on the route. The aircrafts used on these routes will be exchanged to RECREATE specific aircrafts as aircrafts who use air to air refuelling have a much lower design range than the aircrafts they replace. As reference the same routes will be flown by aircrafts without air to air refuelling and a higher design range. These aircrafts have the same efficiency as the RECREATE Aircraft. Also the reference aircrafts will use direct routes while the aircrafts with air to air refuelling will use fuel optimized routes with one or more refuelling operations. The third aircraft type used in the traffic simulation is the Feeder aircraft. The Feeder aircraft will take off from a specific Feeder base and refuel a number of cruiser aircrafts depending on the size of the feeder. The Feeder will then land on the same Feeder base. The main parameters for the Feeder are the Feeder size, the Feeder range and the Feeder efficiency. The Scenario includes 2776 connections between Europe and North-America. In this Transatlantic Scenario 8 Feeder bases have been chosen to serve as take-off and landing airport for the feeder aircrafts. The location of these feeder bases orientates at the optimal refuelling position for these connections. In the simulation the cruiser aircrafts will fly routes where the fuel spend by the cruiser and the fuel spend by the feeder spent on refuelling this cruiser aircraft is minimal. Furthermore the Cruiser will use the same take-off time as the original aircraft in the Eurocontrol data. The Feeder aircrafts then will be scheduled according to the cruisers flight plan. With these fuel optimized routes the traffic is more centred towards the feeder bases. The whole system depends strongly on reliable services at the feeder bases. This paper will discuss the effect of discontinuances at the feeder bases.