Beyond the economically-driven desire to minimise fuel use and hence CO2 emissions, environmental aspects comprising climate impact are not considered in flight planning practices today. Aviation’s contribution to climate change currently amounts to 5% of the anthropogenic climate change with non-CO2 effects, such as contrail formation and the impact of NOx emissions on ozone and methane, contributing by the same order of magnitude as CO2 direct emissions. At present, flight routes are planned on the basis of minimizing operating costs. Concerning aviation induced climate change, impact of CO2 emissions is directly linked to fuel consumption, while non-CO2 emission impacts rather depend on regional and seasonal variations of meteorological conditions. Hence, the contribution of aviation’s non-CO2 effects to global warming (and derived climate change) is more difficult to assess due to its inherent complexity, and it depends on flight performance, weather conditions and time of emission.
The global society is suffering from the impacts of climate change and global warming. Measures and methods have to be developed, defined and implemented to reduce the anthropogenic climate footprint. FlyATM4E is addressing the reduction of environmental impacts by identifying alternative climate-optimized aircraft trajectories by operational measures avoiding regions of the atmosphere which are in particular sensitive to aviation emissions. This enables the reduction of the climate impact of European air traffic, especially for individual flights, while increasing ATM efficiency. By developing methods and strategies to facilitate climate-optimised flight planning and thus limiting the climate change caused by aviation, not only in Europe, but globally applicable, FlyATM4E directly complies with the central element of the Paris Agreement. Moreover, during the course of the project, FlyATM4E developed and applied robust algorithmic climate change functions and formulated recommendations on implementing strategies for integrating climate change impact reduction flight planning into international aviation policies, strategies and planning and thereby complements the UN goal 13.2. FlyATM4E established close interaction between the scientific partners, aviation stakeholders and the general public and thereby guaranteed a broad dissemination of the project results.
FlyATM4E developed a concept to identify climate-optimised aircraft trajectories which can help ATM to provide a robust and eco-efficient reduction in aviation’s climate impact and estimate associated mitigation potential, considering CO2 and non-CO2 emissions through MET data, ensemble prediction and eco-efficient trajectories. The FlyATM4E consortium built on its expertise covering the whole spectrum from atmospheric science and climate research to aviation operations research and aircraft trajectory optimization.
