A Method for Computing Flight Operation Fuel Burn and Emissions Based on ADS-B Trajectories

A complete flight consists of several basic operation modes such as taxi, take-off, climb, cruise, descent and landing. It's more and more important to assess the emissions of various pollutants during a complete flight with the development of green civil aviation. In this paper, a method of computing fuel burn and emissions for complete flight operation is established based on the historical flight schedules and automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) trajectories, combining with the International Civil Aviation Organization's Engine Emissions Databank (ICAO's EEDB) and Base of Aircraft Data (BADA). The flight operation is divided into two cycles: landing and take-off (LTO) and climb/cruise/descent (CCD), by the altitude 3,000ft above airport elevation. To improve the accuracy, several measures are applied such as trajectory denoising, computing actual taxi time, and estimating the climb-out and approach time by interpolation of aircraft trajectory points. To evaluate this method, the fuel burn and emissions inventory of 23 flights departing from Nanjing Lukou International Airport are calculated. The result indicates that the mean relative error of the calculated fuel burn is 5.11% compared with the actual flight operation data and the emissions of CO2, CO, NOx, HC, PM, VOCs, etc. are in accord with the operation rules of aircraft engines.