Abstract
A study on the environmental impact of a short haul aircraft has been performed. Main target of this study is to investigate the effect of flight mission characteristics on total emissions over the lifetime of an airliner, with a major parameter being aircraft annual utilization. The study has been completed using ‘Hermes’ aircraft performance model and ‘Turbomatch’ gas turbine performance code, both developed in Cranfield University and applied on a typical 185 passenger, 2500nm range aircraft. The results show that such an aircraft is expected to produce ∼10000 times its weight in CO2, during a 20-year operating life. The environmental assessment of the effect of utilization strategy and type of mission comes to add to the understanding of aircraft contribution to greenhouse gases at top level strategic route planning phase. As a result, this paper provides an alternative method for estimating the environmental impact of a modern airliner, showing that when optimizing for utilization, conventional expressions of aircraft efficiency, such as fuel per passenger-miles, can be misleading. Such approach can be of value in near future, where CO2 taxation is expected to come to force and affect, therefore, strategic route planning.
