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Environment and Policy Support

New procedures can reduce noise emissions.

Environmental concerns are a serious limiting factor for air traffic. Noise and emissions are the biggest impact of air traffic on the environment. With the growth of air traffic the society gets more and more sensitive regarding these impacts. New concepts and procedures to optimize flight profiles regarding their environmental impact are developed and tested.

This area applies the environmental knowledge and uses dedicated and integrated analytic and/or fast time simulation models to determine capacity and delay figures and the associated environmental load. It finds alternatives to decrease the environmental load. The analytical models are also used to support the governmental organizations in their enforcement tasks with respect to environment. Governmental enforcement is already applicable on noise load and third party risk.

The area is focusing on the maximal utilization of environmental resources by

• developing new concepts and tools for air traffic analysis and evaluation.
• integrating different tools to perform overall air traffic analysis and evaluation
• taking into account different performance indicators like capacity, delay, noise or risk.

Due to the increasing air traffic demands, decision making processes are getting more complex as more constrains have to be taken into account. Whilst the increasing capacity of an airport positively affects the economy the impact on noise load and nuisance and on emissions has to be dealt with. Population especially in the vicinity of an airport won’t accept a decrease in their quality of life by more emissions.

In addition the general framework for these decisions becomes more complicated, due to stricter regulation on noise, third party risk and also higher security requirements. Therefore, stakeholders and governmental organizations ask for assistance in answering strategic questions for different airspace and airport related domains needed for policy making.

Different tools and models are used to analyze actual and future air traffic scenarios with respect to capacity, delay, noise, third party risk and emission. These scenarios can include new operational procedures, such as different runway use and different departure and arrival procedures as well as new infrastructure. The results of these analyses are used by different stakeholders like airport authorities, air service providers or governmental authorities.