Environmental impact assessment of commercial aircraft operations in the United States

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-365).The objective of this thesis was to evaluate the environmental trade-offs inherent in multi-criteria objectives of an integrated environmental policy. A probabilistic multi-attribute impact pathway analysis (MAIPA) was formulated to assess the environmental damages of US commercial aircraft operations from 1991-2003. The initial contribution of this work was demonstrating the feasibility of, and identifying requirements for, the FAA Aviation-environmental Portfolio Management Tool (APMT), an integrated assessment capability for US regulatory decision-making. Non-aircraft sources have been found to dictate marginal emissions costs. The implication is that aviation emissions reductions influence neither the magnitudes nor trends in per-unit marginal damages. In contrast, noise mitigation is the dominant influence on the value of per-unit marginal damages. Trends in sum damages were found to depend on the growth rates of air transport relative to other source emissions. Growth in air transport emissions outpaced non-aircraft sources from 1991-2003. Because growth in marginal costs is nonlinear over this period, aviation emissions damages grow faster than inventories. Applying methods similar to MAIPA to estimate damages for future scenarios suggests that stemming climate impacts is fast becoming the priority. A reassessment of the environmental benefits derived from mandated phase-outs of noisy aircraft during the 1990's has been carried out. Previous studies estimated a -80% reduction in population exposure. In contrast, the reassessment estimates a ~2% reduction, providing benefits 17-20 times lower than published estimates of abatement costs.(cont.) The primary environmental benefit of the noise phase-outs was found to be related to reductions in particulate matter inventories. One way to avoid trade-off inefficiencies is to identify options that bundle benefits. This action provides such an example, where the phase-outs led to reductions in both noise and air quality emissions. Other contributions in the thesis include the following: a treatment of air transport particulate matter emissions, environmental fate, and health impacts of particulate matter; identification that the major source of reducible uncertainty in emissions damages stems from the assumed extent of ozone and particulate matter production in the engine exhaust plume; and quantification of the environmental tradeoffs in decisions specifying aircraft performance for the technology in the US commercial fleet from 1991-2003.by Stephen P. Lukachko.Ph.D

Research on the science and politics of the atmospheric effects of aviation debate

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997.Includes bibliographical references (p. 431-442).by Stephen P. Lukachko.M.S

Assessing the impact of aviation on climate

We present an assessment of the marginal climate impacts of new aviation activities. We use impulse response functions derived from carbon-cycle and atmospheric models to estimate changes in surface temperature for various aviation impacts (CO2, NOx on methane, NOx on ozone, sulfates, soot, and contrails/induced cirrus). We use different damage functions and discount rates to explore health, welfare and ecological costs for a range of assumptions and scenarios. Since uncertainty is high regarding many aviation effects, we explicitly capture some uncertainty by representing several model parameters as probabilistic distributions. The uncertainties are then propagated using Monte Carlo analysis to derive estimates for the impact of these uncertainties on the marginal future climate impacts. Our goal is to provide a framework that will communicate the potential impacts of aviation on climate change under different scenarios and assumptions, and that will allow decision-makers to compare these potential impacts to other aviation environmental impacts. We present results to describe the influence of parametric uncertainties, scenarios, and assumptions for valuation on the expected marginal future costs of aviation impacts. Estimates of the change in global average surface temperature due to aviation are most sensitive to changes in climate sensitivity, the radiative forcing attributed to short-lived effects (in particular those related to contrails and aviation-induced cirrus), and the choice of emissions scenario. Estimates of marginal future costs of aviation are most sensitive to assumptions regarding the discount rate, followed by assumptions regarding climate sensitivity, and the choice of emissions scenario