Environmental Benefits Assessment of Air Traffic Control Automation Tools

摘要

Deployment of advanced automation tools hold potential to address inefficiencies within the air traffic control system. These inefficiencies often manifest in the form of excess delay to flights, which in turn leads to excess fuel burn and emissions which have adverse environmental impacts. To date, the monetization of potential environmental benefits from the deployment of new tools has not been a required part of the official benefit/cost analysis conducted by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to determine its viability. This paper describes a methodology to assess and monetize the environmental benefits associated with the deployment of two new FAA automation systems: the Terminal Flight Data Manager (TFDM) and the Space Data Integrator (SDI). These systems enable significant reductions in fuel burn in different flight phases, and the proposed methodology is used to quantify and monetize the environmental benefits of these systems. Given the growing importance of environmental impacts, it is recommended that assessments similar to those presented here become a required part of the analysis process for new air traffic control systems in the future.