Highly Efficient and Greener Civil Aviation - Organising a Step Jump towards ACARE Goals: An Opportunity for the Present a Vision for Future

摘要

Over the last 70 years, the civil aviation industry has dominated world transport. Growth has been upwards - bigger, farther and faster on an economic productivity basis. With awareness of environmental issues, noise, emissions and energy/fossil fuel reserves, changes will happen and possibly in an accelerating fashion to improve the carbon balances. The NASA and ACARE (Europe) objectives are to reduce Aviation's environmental impact by 50% or more. This paper reviews the current work towards meeting such challenging objectives. A new set of Efficiency metrics of Civil Aviation allow development of a "unified" consistent efficiency theme, relating Payload, Range, Fuel consumed and a measure of Unit Costs. The "value" (cost) and noise effective efficiencies decrease dramatically with increasing Range. An operational strategy leads to a way forward for Fuel-efficient Commercial Aviation using smaller aircraft, adopting Air-to-Air Refueling (AAR) and Close Formation Flying (CFF). For longer ranges, AAR and CFF, in concert, go most of the way toward satisfying NASA/ACARE objectives. Several avenues of further work arise.