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The book addresses all major aspects to be considered for the design and operation of aircrafts within the entire transportation chain. It provides the basic information about the legal environment, which defines the basic requirements for aircraft design and aircraft operation. The interactions between airport, air traffic management and the airlines are described. The market forecast methods and the aircraft development process are explained to understand the very complex and risky business of an aircraft manufacturer. The principles of flight physics as basis for aircraft design are presented and linked to the operational and legal aspects of air transport including all environmental impacts. The book is written for graduate students as well as for engineers and experts, who are working in aerospace industry, at airports or in the domain of transport and logistics.

The European Air Traffic Management Network is unique in its complexity due to numerous stakeholders, airspace configurations and accommodated traffic volumes. Such a complexity challenges both tactical visibility and the network resiliency in general. Therefore we reviewed different perspectives of resiliency and robustness to explore advantages of performance variability in understanding network states. The methodology is based on capturing the emergent disruptions as drivers of performance variability. We claim that capacity regulations reveal restorative mechanisms for tactical planning. Consequently, we conducted statistical evaluations to provide quantitative measures for network state definitions. The methodology is even able to distinguish non-nominal disruptions to either crisis or critical states. The proposed approach is then demonstrated by a data sample covering six months. Furthermore to assess the severity of nonnominal states, we estimated probability distributions of different regulation types. The study is concluded by addressing long term network resiliency based on estimated probability distributions.

ABSTRACTIn aircraft concept selection, uncertainties, resulting from economic noise variables such as fuel price, load factor, so on always exist in the decision making process. These uncertainties are often addressed using Taguchi loss functions for robustness analysis. The study presented in this paper is to utilize multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) methods to solve an aircraft concept selection problem for a hypothetical airline when considering the robustness of the decision. Three MCDM methods were used to conduct the concept selection, including ELimination and Choice Expressing REality, simple additive weighting and technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution. In this study, robustness is introduced as an additional decision criterion in the aircraft selection process. The impact with and without robustness consideration is compared in order to demonstrate how the proposed method makes trade‐offs between nominal performance and address uncertainty in the decision‐making process. In addition, sensitivity analysis is performed to investigate the influence of the decision criteria, especially robustness, on the final ranking of alternatives. The implementation of three MCDM methods on the aircraft selection problem also demonstrates the potential application of MCDM methods in the assessment of air transportation systems, while balancing economical, ecological, and technical constraints. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Impacts of commercial aircraft operation upon the environment, which are caused primarily from emissions of CO2, NOx and the formation of contrails, are matter of growing concern, as aviation is one of the fastest developing industrial sectors worldwide and the awareness of its effects is expanding. Recent research has focused on the cost-benefit potential of different mitigation strategies, which optimize flight trajectories with respect to climate and economy, but most of these mitigation strategies cannot be implemented in the near future due to technical challenges. The objective of this paper is to present an interim mitigation strategy, which bridges this time period. In analogy to military exclusion zones, climate restricted airspaces (CRA) are defined based on 3-D climate change functions, characterizing the environmental impact caused by an aircraft emission at a certain location. Regions with climate costs greater than a threshold value are closed in the corresponding month; others are cleared for air traffic. To estimate the cost-benefit potential of this strategy, a preliminary analysis is conducted on the route from Helsinki (EFHK) to Miami (KMIA). Affected flight trajectories are re-routed optimally around resulting CRA with regard to monetary costs for varying threshold values. Therefore, flight simulation algorithms are developed, which solve a non-linear optimal control problem. For each optimized flight trajectory corresponding average temperature response (ATR) and cash operating costs (COC) are expressed relative to a reference great circle trajectory with constant Mach number and compared with the climate mitigation potential of climate optimized trajectories.