Holistic Planning Tool to Reduce Commercial Aircraft Fuel Consumption during Ground and Flight Operations
Open AccessCurrently, aircraft flight plans are developed by the pilot, and filed with Air Traffic Control (ATC) who is responsible for all flight operations. Flight plans are straightforward and require the pilot to provide data on the departure and destination, proposed speed, altitude, time in flight, and the aircraft route. These inputs are evaluated by ATC, and ATC has the final authority to make changes based on flight rules and air traffic around the area, yet fuel consumption is not a contributing factor in ATC’s decision process. This indicates a specific aircraft could be given flight parameters which do not take advantage of the optimal performance of the fixed-winged aircraft, creating a situation where the flight is optimized for air traffic avoidance but is consuming more fuel than needed (ICAO 2014) as ATC does not use the performance characteristics of the aircraft as part of their route planning (Liu et al. 2015). This Praxis introduces a planning tool aimed at reducing overall fuel consumption by leveraging the FAA’s NextGen Performance Based Navigation (PBN) implementation targeted for 2025-2030, which moves away from ground-based navigation (NAVAIDS) to PBN. By removing NAVAIDS restrictions, the flight envelope can be adjusted to enable several fuel reduction opportunities. This Praxis provides a planning tool focused on the 4 stages of the flight envelope: Taxi, Climb, Cruise and Descent. The tool was calibrated and validated using real world flights and aircraft performance data, allowing the user to input the flight parameters to generate the fuel consumption of the specific flight within a ±2% error band. It further allows for flight stages to be individually optimized to determine the total fuel consumption and the savings when such optimization is executed. The results output by the planning tool indicates that reducing at least 80% of the taxi operation with alternate methods (i.e., towing) can decrease total fuel consumption by more than 5% or more. Second, there is sufficient evidence to imply a total fuel consumption savings of 5% can be realized when the climb vertical speed is increased to value of at least 1000 ft/min. Third, reducing the rate of descent to values less than -1000 ft/min can reduce total fuel consumption by at least 10%. Last, the research demonstrates that executing optimized flight operations for the taxi, climb, and descent stages yields a total fuel consumption savings of at least 15%. The planning tool focused only on the Airbus A320 and the four operations mentioned above (Taxi, Climb, Cruise, Descent), providing a modular platform that can be further modified with alternate aircraft and flight scenarios to simulate different routes and levels of optimization. The planning tool provided proof of significant fuel saving opportunities in flight operations, demonstrating that current aircraft in service can yield reductions in fuel consumption to compete against the 15% fuel reduction opportunities advertised by the next generation of airplanes being introduced into the market.
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Lattanzio_gwu_0075A_15724.pdf | 2022-03-06 | Open Access |
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