Cross-Polar routes offer new opportunities for air travel markets. Transpolar flights reduce travel times, fuel burns, and associated environmental emissions by flying direct paths between many North American and Asian cities. This study evaluates the potential benefits of flying wind-optimal polar routes and assessed their potential impact on climate change. An optimization algorithm is developed for transpolar flights to generate wind-optimal trajectories that minimize climate impact of aircraft, in terms of global warming potentials (relative to warming by one kg of CO 2 ) of several types of emissions, while avoiding regions of airspace that facilitate persistent contrail formation. Estimations of global warming potential are incorporated into the objective function of the optimization algorithm to assess the climate impact of aircraft emissions discharged at a given location and altitude. The regions of airspace with very low ambient temperature and areas favorable to persistent contrail formation are modeled as undesirable regions that aircraft should avoid and are formulated as soft state constraints. The fuel burn and climate impact of cross-polar air traffic flying various types of trajectory including flight plan, great circle, windoptimal, and contrail-avoidance are computed for 15 origin-destination pairs between major international airports in the U.S. and Asia. Wind-optimal routes reduce average fuel burn of flight plan routes by 4.4% on December 4, 2010 and 8.0% on August 7, 2010, respectively. The tradeoff between persistent contrail formation and additional global warming potential of aircraft emissions is investigated with and without altitude optimization. Without altitude optimization, the reduction in contrail travel times is gradual with increase in total fuel consumption. When altitude is optimized, a one percent increase in additional global warming potential, a climate impact equivalent to that of 4070kg and 4220kg CO 2 emission, reduces 135 and 105 minutes persistent contrail formation per flight during a day with medium and high contrail formation, respectively.
This paper describes a weather-impacted traffic index based on three-dimensional weather information and applies it to air traffic delay estimation. The weather-impacted traffic indices were generated using the high-resolution Corridor Integrated Weather System, which provides accurate, automated and high update rate information on both convective weather location and echo tops. In contrast to other methods, the new index discounts an aircraft if it can fly over the weather-impacted area safely, thus incurring no delay. The index was used as an hourly input for various National Airspace System delay estimation models. The models used traffic and weather data from June 2007 and were validated with data from July 2007. Using the index with echo tops improves the delay estimates by two percent.
The design of arrival and departure routes from an airport has to balance the conflicting requirements of fuel efficiency, airport capacity utilization and community emission and noise considerations. The commonly used tools for aircraft noise assessment are the FAA's Integrated Noise Model (INM) and Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). These tools are suitable to generate precise noise contours. However, they are harder to use with other tools for route design optimization involving evaluation of a large number of aircraft trajectories. A simplified aircraft noise computation tool, named AIRNOISE, is developed for preliminary aircraft noise-reduction route design in this paper. AIRNOISE computes aircraft noise based on the same SAE-AIR-1845 procedures used by INM and AEDT. AIRNOISE does not consider components related to terrain and atmosphere adjustments. As a result, it is not only computationally efficient but also flexible to use for customized aircraft profiles. The aircraft noise results are compared with the FAA's AEDT2b and show that the level of accuracy achieved by AIRNOISE can be used to reduce the number of route design options to a small number from a large pool for subsequent accurate analysis by INM.
This paper describes a method to predict delay in the National Airspace System for durations of up to two hours. Various linear autoregressive model structures with exogenous inputs were implemented to perform the delay prediction. Current and forecast weather impacted traffic indices and air traffic volume were used as inputs to the system while the air traffic delay is the predicted output of the model. The refined methodology for generating the weather impacted traffic indices, together with the high-update-rate of Corridor Integrated Weather System is well suited for real-time delay prediction. An adaptive scheme was implemented to provide both weather-related and non-weather-related delay predictions depending on the weather and air traffic condition. The method will benefit air traffic management by facilitating the development of strategies to reduce delays, cancellations, and other costs during the day of operations in various weather conditions.
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