Ayce Celikel, Jean-Claude Hustache, Ivan de Lépinay, Kenny Martin, ENV-ISA, Paris, France

Alan Melrose, EUROCONTROL, Brussels, Belgium

Abstract

Recently, due to the increased rate of growth of air transport and increased environmental concerns, environmental impact of aviation threatens the development of the air transport. Even though there are technological and CNS/ATM improvements to reduce the environmental effect, the increase of flights is much higher than the achieved benefits. In particular aircraft noise is perceived as one of the most important constraints to growth. In fact, ICAO’s Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection (CAEP) recommended new noise abatement procedures to reduce the impact on the areas of surrounding airports.

While implementing new noise abatement procedures, as the main focus is reducing the noise impact, generally other environmental issues are discarded such as global emissions and local air quality. Research and harmonised tools to understand better the relationship between noise and emissions is needed in order to ensure sustainable and cost-efficient operational decisions.

This study highlights the importance to carry out trade-off assessments to understand the interrelation of different environmental impacts of proposed operational decisions and to determine the economic effects of each decision. The trade-off approach consists of:

• Specification of operational scenarios

• Quantification of environmental effects

• Evaluation by converting the quantified values into monetary terms

One illustrative example is developed to assess the feasibility of the trade-off assessment approach. Preferred emissions route (PER) and preferred noise route (PNR) scenarios are used to demonstrate the study feasibility. One of the important aspects of the study is to demonstrate that the combined use of airspace simulation, environmental and economic tools, makes trade-off assessment feasible for any kind of scenarios, and adds value to operational project evaluation.