The aviation environmental impact, including emissions and noise, has increasing importance in the design and operation of commercial aircrafts. The evolution of aircraft design has the potential to significantly improve flight efficiency, but it represents only a long-term solution, whereas improving flight procedures can contribute to the reduction of environmental impact for current and future aircrafts in a shorter time scale. Trajectory optimization methods have been successfully used to minimize pollutant emissions during departure and arrivals, and noise over communities near the airports. In this context, a trajectory optimization framework has been developed, capable of finding flight paths that minimize emissions, flight costs and noise impact while taking into account operational restrictions. This can become a very powerful tool both for policy makers when studying departure and arrival routes, and for pilots, when the next generation of air traffic management systems, studied by SESAR and NextGen, will allow the aircraft to have greater freedom in defining its own flight path. This work introduces this framework and further focus on a numerical benchmark against recorded ADS-B flights departing from the Frankfurt airport. Based on estimated performance data, new optimized trajectories are calculated for each original flight. Analysis of the suggested departure procedures showed improvements in the order of 11% for sleep disturbance by only optimizing the vertical flight profile, and up to 21% in aircraft gaseous emissions.
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