User:Haleyferraris/Environmental effects of aviation

Although, aviation has become extremely popular over the last 15 years, the percentage of people flying has decreased significantly from 2019 to 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. This has caused about a 60% decrease in carbon dioxide emissions.

Stages of Flight
There are many stages in a flight that have different amounts of carbon emissions such as take offs, landings, and taxiing around to different terminals and gates at the airports. Some misconceptions of emissions from aviation is that a majority of the emissions come from take off and landing, but a study in 2010 showed that taxiing and idling is the largest source of emissions in the landing-takeoff cycle. About twenty-five percent of emissions come from this landing-take off cycle, which means that connecting flights are actually worse for the environment than direct flights that might be longer because with connecting flights there are more frequent landings, taxiing, idling, and takeoffs that are unnecessary. Often times there is a queue of aircrafts that are waiting to take off, while stopped in this queue on the taxiway, about 18% of the aircraft's fuel is being consumed. This means that the longer the queue the more fuel is being consumed while idling resulting in more emissions of the aircraft before the aircraft even takes off.

Aircrafts taxiing accumulate for about 76% of fuel consumption in the take off process while accelerating only takes about 3%, other factors include making turns on the taxiway which requires about 6% of fuel consumption, and the rest of the 15% of fuel consumption is used when the aircraft is idling on the taxiway.

Integrating Modeling
With the improvement of scientific knowledge and integrated modeling the FAA can better understand the environmental effects of aviations and can set regulations and goals for the organization to meet to become more environmentally aware. The FAA will only make decisions after seeing that they are backed up by scientists, so creating models that can take into account the cost-benefits analysis of potential solutions it will help the FAA's advanced decision making process

Center of Excellence (COE) is a partnership that the FAA has been working with almost two decades. The COE complies of 75 universities around the United States that has helped the FAA by advancing aviation science and technology to help bring solutions to the problems that are being created in this industry, while also helping the FAA have a return on their investments.

Airport Cooperative Research Program (ACRP) is another research program which is managed by the Transportation Research Board (TRB) of the National Academy of Science. Although they are managed by the National Academy of Science they are funded by the FAA to help research and create new practical solutions to airport operations. A number of the research that the ACRP has done has included the environmental concerns of aviation as well as proposed some practical guidance for airports to incorporate to reduce their emissions. Since this program is authorized in the FAA it is anticipated that this program will continue to perform research projects and grow in the future leading airports in more guidance on how to improve their environmental performance.