Interdependency analysis of current and future criteria and their limits for aircraft noise control in urban areas

Abstract

Aviation in the 21st century contributes to climate change, noise and air pollution. Together with various social and economic problems, environmental issues have the potential to constrain the operation and growth of airports. Constraints on airport capacity affect the capacity of the air navigation system as a whole. Many international airports are operating at their maximum, and some have already reached their operating limits including those resulting from environmental impact. This situation is expected to become more widespread as air traffic continues to increase. A growth of an airport can be controlled by setting up flight safety, operational, economic and environmental limits (Fig. 1) [1]. In addition to the increasing traffic demand, new constraints on the traffic flows have been imposed and limited the capacity and efficiency of air transportation [2, 3]. Apart from airport and airspace capacity issues, that need to be resolved to accommodate further growth, the air transport industry is also facing increasing constraints (short-term and longterm) with respect to environmental pollution, both locally – around the airports, and globally – during the flights on the routes worldwide. EU FP-7 project TEAM_Play (TP) brings sophisticated and well established economic and environmental modelling tools for different sectors (points and areas of concern) and has shown that there are significant interactions and potentially large economic synergies between LAQ control and fuel burn (FB) and greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation. This means that by adopting policies and management strategies that tackle airport noise, local and global air pollution, other factors significant benefits will also be gained in other areas such as climate change mitigation, but also human and environmental health. Modelling Interactions and Synergies Tool (ModIST) quantifies the environmental, technical and economic interactions between mitigation measures for the considered LAQ factors and fuel burn/GHG. It assesses the simultaneous multi-factor impacts reductions on local environment (complex tool ALFA – Airport Local Factors Assessment, including LAQ, Noise and Third Party Risk, all designed in NAU) as well as for selected metrics of greenhouse gases (e.g., the global warming potentials) with further economical evaluations. [...]