Fuel Estimation in Air Transportation: Modeling global fuel consumption for commercial aviation. (November 2020) - Seymour, K.
Graphical abstract: Highlights: We propose a novel framework for Fuel Estimation in Air Transportation (FEAT). FEAT combines computational efficiency and accuracy of fuel burn estimation. Estimating CO2 emissions of all flights performed in one year takes 43 ms. Total CO2 emissions of commercial aviation in 2018 was estimated to be 812 Mt. The modelling error is validated against fuel burn reports and ranges below 5%. Abstract: Accurate fuel burn estimation models are required to assess potential reductions in CO2 emissions stemming from new aircraft technologies. This study provides a novel framework for Fuel Estimation in Air Transportation (FEAT) : a two-component approach comprising of (1) a high fidelity flight profile simulator based on the aircraft performance model from EUROCONTROL, and (2) a reduced order fuel consumption approximation with origin-destination airport pair and aircraft type as sole inputs. The latter allows for accurately estimating fuel consumption for global scheduled aircraft movements of an entire year in a matter of milliseconds. We calculate total CO2 emissions from scheduled commercial aviation in 2018 to be 812 Mt. The modeling error of fuel consumption is validated against fuel burn reports and ranges below 5%. Current aircraft performance models either focus on fuel estimation accuracy or on computational efficiency. Combining both, FEAT enables rapid assessment of decarbonization strategies for commercial passenger aviation.