Affiliations: School of Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: José E. Bernardo, Research Engineer II, Aerospace Engineering, 275 Ferst Dr. Atlanta, GA 30332-0150, USA. Tel.: +412 657 3585; Fax: +404 894 6596; [email protected]
Note: [†] Senior Research Engineer, Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, 275 Ferst Dr. Atlanta, GA 30332-0150, USA.
Note: [‡] Boeing Regents Professor of Advanced Aerospace Systems Analysis, School of Aerospace Engineering, Director, Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, 275 Ferst Dr. Atlanta, GA 30332-0150, USA.
Abstract: Operations forecast are projecting significant growth in total operations in the United States and internationally. As a result there has been a concerted effort to identify technology options to reduce the environmental impacts of aviation including fuel burn, NOx, and noise emissions. To rapidly evaluate the impact of large sets of diverse and interacting technologies, a screening fidelity generic fleet-level approach to measuring environmental impacts is required. Fuel burn and NOx emissions are easily scaled to the fleet-level by generalizing specific flights by aircraft type and route distance. Noise requires airport-level analysis because it is a local and spatial effect. Unique modeling of specific airports does not suit the rapid simplified models of a generic framework. This research discusses a process to create a set of generic airports by decoupling a subset of U.S. airports into their operational and geometric characteristic to perform grouping. The resulting models are demonstrated to provide an accurate system-level estimation of fleet-level contour area through a series of verification and validation tests. The resulting set of Generic Airports can be used to model the baseline set of airports, as well as to categorize other airports not considered for grouping.
