Flight Regimes and Environmental Impact: A Linear Regression Analysis of co<sub>2</sub> Emissions for En-Route Air Traffic Operations


ÇEÇEN R. K.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF AERONAUTICAL AND SPACE SCIENCES, 2024 (SCI-Expanded) identifier identifier

Abstract

Air traffic plays a crucial role in the global economy and connectivity, directly strengthening international trade, job creation, and global connectivity. The number of flights is predicted to increase from 2024 to 2050. However, these increases in traffic numbers will also lead to a rise in fuel consumption and CO2 emission values. Therefore, optimizing the cruise altitude can significantly increase the specific range and lower CO2 emissions. Various factors, including cruise altitude, airspeed, mass, weather conditions, and air traffic management, alter the CO2 emissions of a flight. The air traffic system assigns a flight level for each aircraft based on the current air traffic situation. Aircraft can use three flight regimes for cruise operations: constant altitude and lift coefficient, constant airspeed and lift coefficient, and constant airspeed and altitude. The study aims to calculate the CO2 emission for all flight regimes using a linear regression equation. The flight regime with constant altitude and lift coefficient produces approximately 1.6% more CO2 emissions than the constant airspeed and lift coefficient. In addition, the constant altitude and airspeed flight regime also leads to approximately 4.4% more CO2 emissions than the constant airspeed and lift coefficient. Besides, the Ordinary Least Squares linear regression equation has an R2 = 0.958 for calculating total CO2 emission using the initial weight of the aircraft, initial air density, initial airspeed, initial lift coefficient at the beginning of the cruise phase, distance, aircraft type and flight regime information.