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

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

Hybrid Aircraft for Improved Off-Design Performance and Reduced Emissions

The exceptionally high efficiency of electric motors makes them an enabler for flexible hybrid energy management, which can be used to optimize off-design aircraft operation, such as taxi and descent. The off-design operation contributes to a significant part of the global fuel usage of air transport vehicles as well as to the NOx emissions around airports. Thus, a hybrid chain designed for efficient idle operation could be an economical short-term solution for reduced global environmental impact. This paper focuses on providing and assessing such a design using a conventional 165-PAX-class transonic airliner with an assumed entry into service year of 2035 as a baseline