Abstract
Aviation guarantees mobility, but its emissions also contribute considerably to climate change. Therefore, climate impact mitigation strategies have to be developed based on comprehensive assessments of the different impacting factors. We quantify the climate impact mitigation potential and related costs resulting from changes in aircraft operations and design using a multi-disciplinary model workflow. We first analyze the climate impact mitigation potential and cash operating cost changes of altered cruise altitudes and speeds for all flights globally operated by the Airbus A330-200 fleet in the year 2006. We find that this globally can lead to a 42% reduction in temperature response at a 10% cash operating cost increase. Based on this analysis, new design criteria are derived for future aircraft that are optimized for cruise conditions with reduced climate impact. The newly-optimized aircraft is re-assessed with the developed model workflow. We obtain additional climate mitigation potential with small to moderate cash operating cost changes due to the aircraft design changes of, e.g., a 32% and 54% temperature response reduction for a 0% and 10% cash operating cost increase. Hence, replacing the entire A330-200 fleet by this redesigned aircraft ( M a c r = 0.72 and initial cruise altitude (ICA) = 8000 m) could reduce the climate impact by 32% without an increase of cash operating cost.
Highlights
The environmental impact of aviation, in terms of gaseous pollutants and noise emissions, becomes more and more important to society
1000 km show a lower ATR per km, which comes from lower cruise altitudes and resulting lower impacts of O3, H2 O and contrail-induced cloudiness (CiC)
The opposite is observed for the flights conducted at lower latitudes, where the tropopause is on average above typical cruise altitudes
Summary
The environmental impact of aviation, in terms of gaseous pollutants and noise emissions, becomes more and more important to society. Commercial aviation has experienced a steady growth of travel rates over the last decades and is expected to grow approximately 4.6% per year in terms of passenger kilometers in the 20 years without further political measures [2]. This will largely surpass the typical annual fuel efficiency improvements of 1%–2% [2]. Continuous improvements in transport efficiency were achieved Despite these technological advances the growing demand of commercial air transport and the related number of conducted flights led to an increase in emissions and considerable changes of greenhouse gases, aerosols and induced cloudiness
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