Fuel Flow Analysis for Different Flight Phases Based on a Data-Driven Approach

Ambitious political goals call for the better quantification of the climate impact of air transportation. ICAO adopted its long-term aspirational goal for international aviation to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In this context, states and stakeholders are charged to implement tools for the monitoring of emissions and identify options for improvement. The current Global Air Navigation Plan proposes a set of harmonized indicators, one of these indicators aims at monitoring additional fuel-burn. However, there is limited guidance on how to convert operational measurements of inefficiencies in terms of time and distance to fuel-burn. This research-in-progress paper applies a data-driven approach by studying and comparing available fuel-burn data for flights in China and Europe. This work builds on the bilateral work on operational performance between the two regions. Flights are characterized by a series of trajectory milestones augmented with the cumulative fuel-burn at these positions. This allows to reduce the problem space to comparable phases of flight. The data for this study is based on data collected by the Civil Aviation Administration of China and EUROCONTROL and with the roughly covering 7000 flights with a certain month of operations. We observe similar patterns in terms of operational efficiency in the studied flight phases. The data suggests that medium-type aircraft in both regions burn about 35 kg per minute of flights on average across all phases. The overall metric proposed by this paper suggests an average benefit pool of under 200 kg for the airborne portion of the studies Medium-type aircraft. The results of this initial study can help to complement the ICAO guidance on providing harmonized and validated references for fuel-burn in the various flight phases. However, there is a need to further enhance the flight phase characterization to accommodate the variability of profiles observed in the data. It is planned to augment the data set and validate it with other interested international partner in next iterations of the multi-regional performance benchmarking.