Despite efforts to optimize the design of airframes and engines with the
objective to produce more fuel-efficient aircraft, flight operations may also have a key
role in fuel consumption and emission reductions. The cost of the adoption of
operational procedures related to fuel conservation is relatively less than the investment
in modern technologies and designs, involving most of the times training efforts
adopted by the operational staff. A series of techniques is adopted by airlines with this
objective, such as flight planning, dispatch and in-flight techniques, leading to
improvements of about 6% in fuel efficiency. The automatic speed control and
management provided by the development of Flight Management and Autothrottle
systems permitted the adoption of the Cost Index concept, thus enabling the operators
to further optimize the flight path and therefore minimize fuel and time costs. In
addition, the adoption of aircraft conditioning monitoring programs may point to drag
and engine-degradation patterns, which may be corrected through simple maintenance
actions, with potential to recover up to more than 4% of fuel consumption. Considering
the integration of the aircraft with the airspace system and network, an additional 12%
improvement may be achieving through the adoption of common Air Traffic
Management practices, supported by Communication, Navigation and Surveillance
emerging technologies. Therefore, efficient flight operations have the potential to
provide almost half of the necessary emission reductions required to be achieved by
2050, which should correspond to at least half of the levels in 2005.
Keywords: Air traffic management, Aircraft condition monitoring, Cost index,
Cost optimization, Flight operation engineering, Performance engineering.
