COMPARING THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT FROM USING LARGE AND SMALL PASSENGER AIRCRAFT ON SHORT HAUL ROUTES

摘要

One of the main outcomes of open skies policies is the importance of service frequency in the competition between airlines. To keep load factors high while offering high frequency service, airlines tend to reduce the size of the aircraft used. On short haul routes this phenomenon is even more apparent and especially on routes between hub airports, even though these routes and airports are often congested. This choice of service frequency and aircraft size must have important environmental consequences, which this paper aims to evaluate and quantify. Using the route between London Heathrow and Amsterdam Schiphol airports as a case study, the environmental impact of a large (wide-body) aircraft and small (narrowbody) is compared in terms of noise pollution, local air pollution and climate change impact. The results show that to transport the daily seating capacity offered on the case study route, the use of narrow-body aircraft results in lower local air pollution and climate change impacts than the operation of wide-body aircraft (and lower frequency), but higher noise pollution. This suggests that competition between airlines, which leads them to meet new demand mainly through higher frequency and not larger aircraft, does not carry an environmental penalty and, from an environmental perspective, might even be advantageous.