Environmental impact of pollutants from commercial aircrafts at Hasan Polatkan airport

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the environmental impact of various pollutant emissions including carbon monoxide (CO), carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen oxide (NOx) and hydrocarbon (HC) from aircraft exhaust gases during the landing and take-off (LTO) cycles at Eskisehir Hasan Polatkan Airport, Turkey, between 2017 and 2018. Design/methodology/approach The methodology approach used to calculate the emissions from aircrafts is based on the ICAO databank and the actual data records taken from Presidency of The Republic of Turkey Directorate of Communications (DoC). Findings The maximum amount of total fuel burnt during the two years is 80.898 and 70.168 tons in 2017 and 2018, respectively, while the average fuel burnt per year from 2017 to 2018 is approximately 369.773 tons. The highest CO, CO2, NOx and HC emissions are found to be 248.3 kg in 2017, 261.380 tons, 1.708 tons and 22.15 kg, during the 2018 year, respectively. Average CO, HC, NOx and CO2 emissions amount per year are observed to be 1.392 tons, 135 kg, 6.909 tons and 1,143 tons, respectively. Considering the average of total emission amount as an environmental factor, as expected, CO2 emissions contributed the most to the total emissions while HC emissions contributed the least to the total emissions from the airport. Practical implications The study presents the approach in determining the amounts of emissions released into the interannual atmosphere and it explicitly provides researchers and policymakers how to follow emissions from commercial aircraft activities at different airports. Originality/value The value of the study lies in the transparent computation of the amounts of pollutants by providing the data directly from the first hand-DoC.