Description
This area of contains knowledge about environmental impact of air transport. This includes noise and nuisance, emissions and third party risk.

Challenges
Environmental concerns are a serious limiting factor for air traffic. This is true in close vicinity of airports where noise is an issue of much debate but also on a global scale where emisssions of substances like CO2 and NOx are a major concern. These concerns will even become bigger when air travel grows as expected. A lot of effort is spent on reduction of emissions and noise production of aircraft. But optimizing operational procedures can also contribute significantly to reduce the environmental impact.

Activities
The basic activities in this field are development of measuring techniques, models and tools to assess and predict environmental impact of aircraft operations. Furthermore, new concepts and procedures to optimize flight profiles with the goal to reduce environmental impact are developed and tested. Another important factor is supply of independent and objective information to the public and policy makers about actual and expected future noise and emission levels.

Examples

• Noise modelling
  
• Noise monitoring systems
  
• Environmental simulators
  
• Continuous descent approaches
  
• Internet flight monitoring systems