Civil aviation has matured to become a vital piece of the global economy, providing the rapid movement of goods and people to all regions. This has already led to significant growth and expectations of further growth are on the rate of 5% per year. Given the high projected rate of growth, environmental consequences of commercial aviation are expected to rise. To mitigate the increase of noise and emissions, governing bodies such as ICAO and the FAA have established and are considering additional regulation of noise, NOₓ, and CO₂ while the European Union has integrated aviation into their Environmental Trading Scheme. The traditional response to new regulation is to integrate technologies into the aircraft to reduce environmental footprint. While these benefits are positive on the aircraft level, fleet growth is projected to outpace benefits provided by technology alone. To further reduce environmental footprint, a number of mitigation strategies are being explored to determine the impact. One of those strategies involves changing the mission specifications of today's aircraft by reducing range, speed, or payload in an effort to reduce fuel consumption and has been predominantly focused at the vehicle level.
This research proposes an approach that evaluates mission specification changes from the aircraft design level up to the fleet level, forecasted into the future, to assess the impact over a number of metrics to fully understand the implications of mission specification changes. The methodology Mission Specifications and Fleet Implications Technique (MS-FIT) identifies stakeholder requirements that will be tracked at either the vehicle or fleet level and leverages them to build an environment that will allow joint evaluation to facilitate increased knowledge about the full implications of mission specification adoption.
Additionally laid out is an approach on how to select prospective routes for intermediate stops based on fuel burn and operating cost considerations. Guidance is provided on how to filter down a list of candidate airports to those most viable as well as regions of the world most likely to benefit from intermediate stops.
Three sample problems were used to demonstrate the viability of MS-FIT: cruise speed reduction, design mission range reduction, and the combination of speed and range reduction. Each problem was able to demonstrate different implications from the implementation of the different specification changes. Speed reduction can negatively impacts cost while range reduction has consequences to noise at the intermediate airports. The combination of the two draws in negative implications from both even though the environmental benefits are better.
Finally, an analysis of some of the assumptions was conducted to examine the sensitivity to the results of speed and range reduction. These include variation in costs, reductions in annual utilization of aircraft, and variation in intermediate stop adoption. Speed reduction is strongly sensitive to increases in crew and maintenance rates while landing fees significantly eat into the benefits of range reduction and intermediate stops. Minor utilization reductions can significantly reduce the viability of speed reduction as the increase in capital costs offset all the savings from fuel reduction while range reduction is a little less sensitive. Intermediate stop variation does not eliminate the benefits of range reduction and even can provide cost savings depending on the design range of the reduced variant but it can have consequences to airport noise to higher traffic airports.
With the proposed framework, additional information is available to fully understand the implications with respect to fuel burn, NOₓ emissions, operating cost, capital cost, noise, and safety. This can then inform decision makers on whether pursuing a particular mission specification strategy is advantageous or not.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:GATECH/oai:smartech.gatech.edu:1853/53088 |
| Date | 12 January 2015 |
| Creators | Brett, Paul S. |
| Contributors | Mavris, Dimitri |
| Publisher | Georgia Institute of Technology |
| Source Sets | Georgia Tech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
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