Environmental inefficiencies for arrival flights at European airports

In this paper, we analyze two months of trajectory data for aircraft landing in five major European airports. Based on open ADS-B data from the OpenSky Network and open performance models, we enrich all trajectories with automatically detected procedure information, fuel consumption, and emissions for supported aircraft types. To assess the...

OpenSky Report 2023: Low Altitude Traffic Awareness for Light Aircraft with FLARM

Established in 2013, The OpenSky Network, a crowdsourced network of ADS-B receivers, has consistently collected surveillance data from equipped aircraft and made it available for science. Coverage has steadily improved, boasting more than 6000 registered sensors worldwide today. This platform has aided numerous researchers in publishing studies...

Environmental Impact Optimisation of Flight Plans in a Fixed and Free Route network

Efforts to minimise the environmental impact of aviation can be implemented at several levels including electric green taxiing systems, novel propulsion systems, jet fuels, improvements in aircraft efficiency and optimisation of climb profiles. In this paper, we address the optimisation of flight plans in a route network considering operational...

Evading the Public Eye: On Astroturfing in Open Aviation Data †

The usage of large private and business jets, from those owned by Elon Musk to Kylie Jenner and Bernard Arnault, has recently attracted considerable attention in many countries. Enabled by open and crowdsourced aircraft tracking systems based on the automatic dependent surveillance–broadcast protocol, the aircraft and their owners have been...

Environmental Footprint of Private and Business Jets †

Civil aviation contributes to rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Flights carried out by private and business jets are only a very small fraction of commercial passenger flights. However, these private flights are extremely environmentally inefficient and account for the most emissions per passenger in the aviation sector. While the...

Evaluating Aviation Emission Inefficiencies and Reduction Challenges with Electric Flights

Inefficiencies in flight operations, like deviations and non-optimal flight speed or altitude, are directly linked to flight emission inefficiencies. Quantifying these emission inefficiencies and studying potential mitigation strategies is certainly beneficial for the sustainability of the aviation industry. In this paper, we analyze emission...

OpenSky Report 2022: Evaluating Aviation Emissions Using Crowdsourced Open Flight Data

The environmental impact of aviation has become the focus of increased concerns for policymakers around the world. The recent pandemic provided many interesting case studies on the impact of aviation on the environment. Following the initial COVID-19 containment measures and hard lockdowns, the sharp decrease in aircraft movements caused a...

OpenSky Report 2021: Insights on ADS-B Mandate and Fleet Deployment in Times of Crisis

The year 2020 had been selected by EU and US regulators as the deadline for ADS-B compliant Mode S transponders, following various iterations of ADS-B and Mode S services. It will also be remembered as marking a profound change in civil aviation, when the global virus outbreak triggered an unprecedented slowdown in traffic and brought immense...

A Framework to Evaluate Aircraft Trajectory Generation Methods

Aircraft trajectory generation is a widely addressed problem with applications including emergency trajectory generation, collision risk models, air traffic flow and capacity management or airspace design. State of the art methods to generate individual trajectories and optimise some performance or emergency criterion may lack of realism with...

Mode S Transponder Comm-B Capabilities in Current Operational Aircraft

Mode S surveillance allows air traffic controllers to interrogate certain information from aircraft, such as airspeeds, turn parameters, target altitudes, and meteorological conditions. However, not all aircraft have enabled the same capabilities. Before performing any specific interrogation, the surveillance radar must acquire the transponder...

Detecting and Measuring Turbulence from Mode S Surveillance Downlink Data

Instability in the movement of air masses in the atmosphere can result in turbulence. Most often, turbulence causes discomfort to passengers but it can occasionally affect their safety as well. Turbulence experienced by aircraft can be difficult to predict, especially for clear air turbulence (CAT) which occurs in the absence of any visual clues...

Detecting Events in Aircraft Trajectories: Rule-Based and Data-Driven Approaches

The large amount of aircraft trajectory data publicly available through open data sources like the OpenSky Network presents a wide range of possibilities for monitoring and post-operational analysis of air traffic performance. This contribution addresses the automatic identification of operational events associated with trajectories. This is a...