Ebook: Air Transport and Operations

Air transport operations and aircraft design development is currently governed by incremental improvements. Only once in 16 years there is a step change in civil aviation, often as a result of external factors like military developments. Seldom are step changes due to business or technological developments within the system itself. The introduction of low cost carriers is one of the few examples of novel thinking within the sector. However the concept of airports has not changed since the 1930s, air traffic management is still based on concepts out of the same year, new aircraft look like the first generation of civil jets etc. Is the sector mature and do we still need technological research that is governed by the law of diminishing returns? Can the sector find answers to new challenges that lay ahead? Just to mention a few: environmental pressures often leading to curtailing of air transport; the availability, accessibility and pricing of oil; scarce materials; focus on customer orientation and multi modal solutions; competition from new countries like China and India that experience high growth rates and can spend far more money to become leading aviation countries. Are we looking for creative solutions for long term problems and are we stimulating the younger generation to think out of the box to enable a totally different air transport system in 2050? Initial analysis shows that the education systems do not sufficiently stimulate creative thinking of the new generation. During the EU sponsored Out of the Box and CREATE projects the author together with Trevor Truman experimented with mechanisms to stimulate creative thinking through dedicated workshops. The results were encouraging although perhaps 1% of all ideas generated seem to be promising in the end. These ideas relate to both the overall air transport system, the different elements of that system and breakthrough technologies. The CREATE project recommended to the European Commission to continue the initiatives to generate novel ideas and to enable funding of the most promising ones. And the Commission is willing to follow up this suggestion by funding research. New ideas need to be formulated. These do not always need to be fundamentally new, but can be based on ideas from the past that were not followed up for example due to the limited technological knowledge at the time of invention. Humans resist and are afraid of change. An example is the idea of air taxi operations in Europe developed together with the TU Delft. Instead of emphasizing the possible benefits, people will stress the possible negative elements and hope that nothing will change. Whilst using the argument of safety, many novel ideas are killed at an early stage. In that sense, regulation is a barrier for innovation. There is a need to intensify the search for novel ideas. Universities will have a major task in this process as the industry and research establishments are more and more short term oriented. Creative thinking processes will therefore need to be a permanent element of the university curricula.

At the beginning of 21st century there has been an exponential increase in the production of the UAV systems. Today more than 700 different types of UAVs are being used for reconnaissance, intelligence and recently for combat. Bulk of these efforts primarily focuses on national security and war-fighting purposes. Almost nothing has been done for transportation which can serve for purposes ranging from military to life-saving humanitarian purposes. It is predicted that a paradigm shift for unmanned transportation will take place and the whole transportation system including cargo handling will switch to unmanned systems in the near or far future. However, there are challenges on this quest and they cannot be overcome by technology alone. This study explores the prejudgment of unmanned aerial vehicle systems being unsafe and aims to address constraints and concerns on technology, flight safety, and legal responsibilities. The potential bumpy areas that need governments' action through the unmanned aerial transportation road will be presented by analyzing the general problems faced in manned and unmanned flight.

Since the Wright brothers took to the skies over 100 years ago, aviation has been powered by fossil fuels. This dependency will not be markedly reduced within the next two decades despite higher and more erratic fuel prices that result from increasingly restricted access to crude oil. Climate change will also force regulators to increase the price of CO₂ emissions so that there is an even greater incentive to operate fuel efficient aircraft. This project therefore aims to investigate how the profit generated by a short-range jet engine can be made robust to uncertain fuel and carbon prices in 2030 by applying the Surplus Value Methodology in conjunction with Robust Design techniques.

The goal of this paper is to develop a tool to forecast the customer value of wing movables produced by a tier-one aircraft component manufacturer. From literature it was found that in general the value of a product is a function of performance, costs and availability. For the products under consideration the value is thus influenced by the performance efficiency, the functionality and the effect of the design on the direct operating costs of the aircraft. The effect of value levers on the customer value for a product is determined via a hedonic model, linking together the recurring price and the value induced by each individual value lever. In this model the effects of a change of each individual value lever are multiplied with a customer weighting factor and summed together. Together with the recurring price this will give an indication of the value of a product as perceived by the customer.

Common communication provided by World Wide Web and current computing capabilities create opportunity to offer new quality in logistic services and considerable cost reduction of business activities. A potential to increase effectiveness and decreasing cost of business activities in the supply chain exists in optimization of activities on a cross company level. An e-platform is a feasible way to implement IT tools that can enhance collaboration, introduce new distribution channels and facilitate added value services. Possible benefits and technical issues will be investigated. An EU co-funded project Baltic.AirCargo.Net will be presented. During project realization, an information platform for air cargo industry will be developed, based on Imotris platform that has been developed for the maritime freight industry. The platform will contribute to development of regional airports through better interoperability with existing transport networks and improved accessibility to air cargo market.

Instead of performing maintenance at fixed intervals, the operational efficiency of assets can be improved significantly when the maintenance is performed in a more dynamic manner. This can be achieved by monitoring the systems condition and tailor the maintenance activities accordingly or by monitoring the usage of the system and calculate the remaining life and the associated maintenance. In this paper, it will be shown that both approaches require, or at least benefit from, knowledge of the underlying failure mechanisms and governing loads.

In many MRO departments problems are encountered with the use of manuals, task lists and ‘black books’ on paper. These problems are a critical factor for aviation safety and productivity in MRO. The NLR (Dutch National Aerospace Laboratory) has proposed a system called PAMELA using handheld computers to overcome many of the problems associated with the use of paper documents in aviation maintenance. The PAMELA concept has not previously been tested in actual practice. This paper presents the results of a study to determine which functions will need to be fulfilled by a handheld computer in aviation maintenance for it to be successfully introduced.

Aero engine Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) generate more than half of their revenue from aftermarket services. This research investigates the effect of two main categories of sustainment contracts in this industry, namely Time & Material Contracts (T&MCs) and Outcome-Based Contracts (OBCs), on defense aero engine reliability. A Rolls-Royce dataset with military aero engine repairs is analyzed by using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression and survival analysis with the semi-parametric Cox model and the parametric Weibull model. Results from an existing study on the civil sector are used to compare the defense with the civil aero engine aftermarket.

The prediction of the behaviour of complex systems remains a costly and time consuming activity due to their data intensive nature. Such dynamic systems do not always lend themselves to a quantitative behavioural analysis. Davies et al have developed a novel qualitative approach aimed at determining how a system element deviates from a pre-defined “normal” operational mode due to a change in the operation of another element existing within the same architecture, or due to an interaction with an external environmental condition. This qualitatively determines the elements in the system that would be affected by a modification, and can aid in system development by identifying relationships and interdependencies prior to implementation. Previous analyses have shown it to difficult to comprehend the impact results due to large numbers of fluctuations in impact arising from noise. In Air Traffic Management systems there are many minor delays occuring daily but they do not affect the system operations or the stakeholders, these have been classed as noise. This paper introduces the application of a noise level into the impact analysis and, through a modelled scenario and variance in the computational boundary, demonstrates that it improves the understanding and transparency of the results, and an optimum level can be determined. The capability and potential for analyzing large scale complex systems has been demonstrated further.

This paper presents the results of a research effort aimed at the development of a novel tool for synthesizing RNAV approach trajectories that minimize a cumulative noise criterion, taking into account the total noise effect of all flight movements aggregated over a period of one year. This new multi-event trajectory optimization framework is an extension of a tool called NOISHHH developed previously for the design of single-event noise abatement trajectories. Application of the adapted optimization framework to the design of noise abatement RNAV approach routes at Rotterdam The Hague airport in the Netherlands reveals a significant improvement in terms of the number of people highly annoyed due to annual noise exposure in comparison to the existing situation.

The search for alternative fuels has lead to a number of possibilities. The most promising alternative fuels for the short term are drop-in fuels such as synthetic fuel and hydrotreated renewable jet. These fuels are similar to Jet A-1 but some differences are present. Synthetic fuels are produced using a process that results in a fuel without trace elements and almost no aromatics. Furthermore, synthetic fuels have a higher energetic content and lower gravimetric density than Jet A-1. These differences cause several effects when considering the use of synthetic fuel in aircraft. A performance model is used to show that the payload-range performance is changed and that an efficiency gain is achieved on the fuel consumption for a regular flight. Measurement of the soot emissions for several blends of synthetic fuel with Jet A-1 show that increasing the amount of synthetic fuel leads to significant reductions in soot emissions. Reductions of 50 to 70% in particle mass emitted can be reached by using 50% synthetic fuel. This might reduce the amount of contrails and aircraft induced cirrus clouds and seriously increase local air quality around airports.

As is true with many of Europe's airports, Luxembourg's Findel International Airport is found in close proximity to the nation's city center (6km). In this paper we focus on the Cargolux Airlines' airfreight operations and report on a multi-cost problem that has been developed so that costs are shared between the company, the state and the private citizen. Here we search for a cost effective solution using the night noise metric L_N. A best (lowest shared cost) solution among a set of predefined scenarios is found. The approach used is consistent with the legislative framework of the European Union Directive on Assessment and Management of Environmental Noise and the European Balanced Approach. We also discuss the potential affect of background noise and noise over threshold, previously omitted in the shared cost study. A web-based aviation scheduling tool is also presented. The tool allows an end-user, the company, the regulating authorities, or interested stakeholders, to adjust tunable parameters, including aircraft scheduling, route choice and arrival/takeoff parameterization.

This paper presents the results of a case study aimed at determining how modern accident causation theory can contribute to the safety performance of a specific aerospace MRO-service provider, taking in account existing organizational structures and limitations in available resources. The underlying premise is that learning from what goes wrong is paramount to understanding actual organizational processes.

The expected number of airplanes flying is increasing every year. By 2025, U.S. commercial air carriers are projected to fly 2.1 trillion available seats per mile and transport 1.3 billion passengers for a total of 1.7 trillion passenger miles. Furthermore regional carriers are growing faster than mainline carriers (3.8 vs. 2.8 percent a year). This means that if aviation safety does not keep improving, the accident rate will probably increase.

Furthermore, studies show that at least 20% of the root causes of accidents arise in the design stages and when safety problems are discovered later on, they are often difficult and expensive to be resolved.

For these reasons, a methodology has been developed which enables the evaluation of conceptual aircraft design from a safety point of view. It is an approach for conducting a structured analysis which can assess and quantify safety and risks of design features for conceptual aircraft design.

In this paper it will be shown that the most important advantage of this methodology is to allow designers to evaluate and compare the total effect of different design options on safety during the conceptual design of aircraft.

In ultra safe and complex, dynamic systems, safety requires a new approach in which:

- safety is a strategic value in decision making and business modeling

- safety investigations focuses on knowledge deficiencies and systems change

- safety is a system state, represented by a state/space vector.

In order to cope with non-linear interactions and interventions, safety is designed into the systems as an inherent property before it manifests itself as an emergent property in practice. To this purpose, new scientific notions are mobilized, such as value and knowledge based engineering, forensic engineering and resilience management. The design of safer systems should apply a non-linear design methodology, including prototyping and simulation. Such design should focus on the functional level, inherent system properties and synchronization of event and system state vectors.

For a comprehensive assessment of new aircraft designs and technologies the whole aircraft life cycle has to be considered. Therefore, not only economic but also environmental impacts must be taken into account due to increasing ecological awareness of politics, companies and society. This paper presents an interdisciplinary methodical approach towards describing and evaluating the costs as well as the ecological and socio-economic effects in the course of the whole life cycle of an aircraft. In this context an aircraft is described by the top-level aircraft requirements, and design and process specifications. The life cycle is split up into four phases: design and development, production, operations, and recycling and disposal. For each of these phases methods are developed that aim at determining its financial, ecological and social impact on the aircraft life cycle, and finally are integrated into one platform.

In attempt to reduce project cost and time overruns, evaluation of the product design process has become a key focus. Through the introduction of Value Engineering a paradigm shift has resulted whereby designers seek the most economically viable design, rather than strictly following customer requirements; which in past practices often resulted in expensive, inefficient product solutions. As systems become more complex vast quantities of information throughout the product development cycle is generated for analysis. Although analysis and control of the data presents an issue there are two main uses for the information. Opportunities exist where; more accurate flexible design solutions can be produced and application of Visual Analytics practises allow for a more user defined analysis as opposed to generic automatic data analysis and presentation. This paper will introduce the development of an innovative concept that will advance theories developed in Systems Engineering and Value-Driven Design. The concept will utilise regulatory and manufacturing information, to produce an optimised set of design solutions. The paper will perform an objective assessment of current engineering design practices, identify the benefit of using manufacturing and regulatory information in the design phase and identify a method through which the concept can be unified into a functional design environment.

Airport strategic planning is currently a rather cumbersome process, due to the complexity of the airport system and the wide variety of stakeholders involved. These stakeholders include airport authorities, air traffic service providers, airlines, regulatory agencies, and the general public. Historically, the airport planning process has usually been conducted with only a single objective in mind – that capacity should match revealed demand. Nowadays, the planning process is driven by many more objectives, such as safety, affordability, financial and economic benefits, and environmental impact, which have to be balanced. Currently, no integrated software tools, let alone decision support systems, are available that can be used to develop strategic plans for airport development. The HARMOS DSS has been developed to fill this gap. This paper demonstrates how the architecture of the HARMOS DSS supports an airport operator and its stakeholders to think and work together on airport strategic planning problems. We'll show how the design of the architecture involves stakeholders in the planning process, supports dealing with the uncertain future, and improves the efficiency of problem solving.