Minimising emissions from flights through realistic wind fields with varying aircraft weights
Cathie A. Wells, Paul D. Williams, Nancy Nichols, Dante Kalise, Ian Poll
Abstract
The international aviation community has agreed to advance actions to reduce CO2 emissions. Adopting more fuel-efficient routes will achieve this goal quickly and economically. Full satellite coverage of transatlantic flight routes is now a reality, allowing us to consider moving from the Organised Track Structure to Trajectory-Based Operations. Here, fuel-optimal trajectories through wind fields from a global atmospheric re-analysis dataset are found using dynamic programming. The control variables of aircraft headings and airspeeds are varied to find free-time, fuel-minimal routes. Aircraft fuel consumption is modelled with a new model-specific fuel-burn function, which incorporates aircraft mass reductions as fuel is burned. From 1 December 2019 to 29 February 2020, fuel use from simulated routes is compared with fuel estimates based on recorded flight data. Results demonstrate that an average fuel reduction of 4.2% is possible without significant changes to flight duration. This equates to a reduction of 16.6 million kg of CO2 emissions. Therefore, free-time, fuel-minimal routes have the potential to offer substantial fuel and emissions savings.