Foundations of a Framework to Evaluate Impacts on Future Noise Situations at Airports

Abstract

Noise emissions in the vicinity of airports are a major challenge regarding the future of aviation. In this work we present the development of a framework to assess the impacts on future noise situations at the multi-event level. The framework at its top-level consists of three main areas: Modeling future airport flight plans, modeling aircraft noise at the vehicle level, and modeling aircraft noise at the airport level, which makes use of the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). This paper focuses on airport flight plan modeling that derives future flight plans from a given flight plan considering user-specific scenario input. Therein, firstly, air traffic growth is considered. Secondly, the retirement of aircraft is considered by analyzing the age distribution of the current world aircraft fleet and by applying retirement curves for nine aircraft clusters. Thirdly, aircraft introduction is considered allowing for the precise definition of aircraft fleet composition to enter the fleet in future years. Fourthly, a simple capacity module considers airport capacity constraints. The framework does not aim at forecasting actual future flight plans or absolute noise levels, but aims for relative scenario comparisons for the purpose of impact assessments. A use case applies the developed flight plan model to Munich Airport.

Influence of Airport Capacity Limitation Mitigation on Air Traffic Networks and Fuel Consumption

“…Figure 6 depicts a general increase in average seat numbers per flight in the simulation period of about 30.8 % for the reference and 33.8 % for the use case. This follows the observation of a persistent growth in aircraft seat capacity also described by Will et al [27] and Gelhausen et al [14]. Such a growth in seats per flight might already hint at the implicit way in which the air transport system reacts to infrastructure constraints and is also inherently implemented in the available aircraft clusters used in this work.…”

Evolutionary Fleet Development Considering Airport Capacity Limitations and their Mitigation

“…These are the use of aircraft with higher passenger capacity and the shifting of traffic to underutilized airports. At many airports recent decades brought a rise in the average seat numbers per flight (see, e.g., the work of Will et al [27]). The increase in aircraft size is one reason for the number of air traffic movements growing much slower as compared to air transport demand [4], at least delaying capacity constraints at some airports.…”