Life cycle inventories for aviation: Background data, shortcomings, and improvements

In the context of growing environmental awareness and a drive towards sustainable aviation, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) emerges as a pivotal tool for evaluating the environmental impacts of current and novel technologies. This paper focuses on Life Cycle Assessment within the aviation sector, with a specific emphasis on Life Cycle Inventories (LCIs) and databases. Recognizing a relevant data gap in existing databases regarding aircraft maintenance, our study seeks to address this limitation. A maintenance, repair and overhaul use-case is proposed as an illustrative example to enrich underrepresented data in LCIs. Our methodology considers the entire service life of aircraft, building a cumulative life cycle inventory in a cradle-to-gate approach. Geographical representativeness is ensured for maintenance activities conducted in Germany, with extrapolation applied across Europe where necessary. Our findings underscore the need to differentiate maintenance activities between aircraft components and engines, as well as the importance of considering various flight scenarios, ranging from short to long haul. This paper contributes to the advancement of LCA in aviation by providing insights into improving data accuracy and completeness. It also delves into how and why data generation is possible and what are the necessary data improvements within the topic. This paper is aimed at LCA practitioners in both research and industry, thus fostering sustainable practices in aviation. • Life cycle inventories for aviation currently lack enough data representativeness. • Aircraft maintenance datasets are relevant for achieving data enrichment in aviation. • Data aggregation levels change depending on the target audience and intended use. • For general LCA, airframe and engine maintenance for medium haul flights is sufficient. • For sector-specific, splitting the datasets for different flight distances is necessary.