Flight Operations and Environment

Despite efforts to optimize the design of airframes and engines with the objective to produce more fuel-efficient aircraft, flight operations may also have a key role in fuel consumption and emission reductions. The cost of the adoption of operational procedures related to fuel conservation is relatively less than the investment in modern technologies and designs, involving most of the times training efforts adopted by the operational staff. A series of techniques is adopted by airlines with this objective, such as flight planning, dispatch and in-flight techniques, leading to improvements of about 6% in fuel efficiency. The automatic speed control and management provided by the development of Flight Management and Autothrottle systems permitted the adoption of the Cost Index concept, thus enabling the operators to further optimize the flight path and therefore minimize fuel and time costs. In addition, the adoption of aircraft conditioning monitoring programs may point to drag and engine-degradation patterns, which may be corrected through simple maintenance actions, with potential to recover up to more than 4% of fuel consumption. Considering the integration of the aircraft with the airspace system and network, an additional 12% improvement may be achieving through the adoption of common Air Traffic Management practices, supported by Communication, Navigation and Surveillance emerging technologies. Therefore, efficient flight operations have the potential to provide almost half of the necessary emission reductions required to be achieved by 2050, which should correspond to at least half of the levels in 2005.

Keywords: Air traffic management, Aircraft condition monitoring, Cost index, Cost optimization, Flight operation engineering, Performance engineering.