The SESAR 3 JU — the Single European Sky Air Traffic Management Research 3 Joint Undertaking — is an incredibly complex yet immensely valuable EU-level public-private partnership. Its latest iteration, established in 2021, aims to validate and accelerate aviation research and development to pluck some of the earliest fruits of net zero emissions reduction from the tree. ALBATROSS, a large-scale demonstrations project within the JU programme, is a key early part of its validation efforts, so we sat down with its air traffic management expert Olivia Nuñez to learn more.
Within the innovation pipeline of the SESAR Joint Undertaking programme, ALBATROSS is one of several very large scale demonstration projects covering numerous solutions that were identified by earlier stages of SESAR work. Others include the ongoing DREAMS, focussing on departure and approach procedures, CORUS-XUAM on urban air mobility operations, and ADSCENSIO, looking at increasing the accuracy of flight predictability.
Key to these very large scale demonstrations is that they bring in a wide variety of players at all levels and provide real-world, credible validation. For ALBATROSS, the cast list includes airlines, airports, air navigation service providers, research organisations, airframers and equipment manufacturers.
What makes the ALBATROSS options different to other large scale demonstrations is that it is addressing all phases of flight, combining existing solutions within the SESAR Solutions Catalogue [PDF] with new options that are “of high technical maturity, but [that] are not yet part of our solutions catalogue, but we foresee that they will become so”, Olivia Nuñez from the SESAR Joint Undertaking explains.
“As our Catalog grows so does the need to put these solutions in context,” Nuñez notes.
Many within the aviation industry will have first heard of ALBATROSS at the Airbus Summit on sustainability last September, where the airframer, together with Air France and French national air navigation service provider DSNA, cooperated on an optimised trajectory flight from Paris to Toulouse under ALBATROSS’ auspices.
That was the first trial within the project, which is studying the effectiveness of a wide range of solutions, starting with the very biggest picture items like planning the integration of new energy-efficient aircraft types on the horizon, especially if these operate in different ways to current generations of aircraft.
Solutions at every level are included in ALBATROSS
The Joint Undertaking’s 2021 Solutions Catalogue [PDF] contains dozens upon dozens of options, Nuñez explains, not all of which can work together. “Some can be complimentary, some are one or the other, and so for us, it’s really important to have these pioneer projects that are looking a little bit at everything and see what can be done.”
At the literal and figurative highest level of the solutions comes the design and utilisation of airspace, which necessarily must take into account the complex, busy and nationally administered airspace above Europe. The development and production of more sustainable aviation fuels, and the infrastructure for delivering them, is also key.
Civil-military coordination, optimised and shared flight planning, and advanced network operations are also included. Nuñez highlights that much of the information required for this kind of optimisation is already held in aircraft flight management systems, but a critical blocker has been getting this kind of information off the aircraft via inflight connectivity and processed quickly enough to aid decision-making.
At the airport, surface management and taxiing show much promise in three particular areas. First, single-engine taxiing (or two-engine taxiing for four-engined aircraft) can cut taxi fuel consumption by 20%.
Non-autonomous and semi-autonomous options refer to more sustainable ways of moving the aircraft around the airport’s aprons and taxiways using an external vehicle. This includes new hybrid towing vehicles like the TaxiBots tested at Amsterdam Schiphol during the height of the COVID pandemic, allowing full pilot control after pushback, but with power from the TaxiBot instead of the aircraft’s engines. This is particularly valuable at airports like Schiphol with runways that are relatively remote to the terminals, and can cut taxi fuel consumption by 50-85%.
Autonomous taxiing, where electric motors in the landing gear move the aircraft without the need for an external vehicle, is another option. There are obvious design requirements and weight penalties to account for, but ground operations and pushback costs, including the sunk carbon in manufacturing and operating tugs, are substantially reduced.
At takeoff and landing, ALBATROSS is looking at reducing the time aircraft spend with engines on before takeoff, as well as optimising aircraft separation by wake category.
During climb and descent, the project focusses in three areas: noise pollution to airport neighbours, direct emissions impacts and overall emissions impacts. Climbs and descents optimised for efficiency mean predictability and fewer emissions, but the technical and operational challenges must be overcome.
En route, optimised trajectories for winds, predictable flight paths, realtime accurate flight data sharing and common operations expectations will all reduce emissions during the cruise phase.
ALBATROSS is grappling with the thorny issue of measurement
ALBATROSS is also about showing how all these solutions, which have been individually proven to be effective, work together — and in which ways they require further harmonisation.
Critically, the project identifies that demonstrating environmental benefits requires measurements that are transparent, robust and which can be compared with the status quo control. This involves, Nuñez explains, a variety of best practices and methodologies.
One is paired gate-to-gate trajectory analysis, where the environmental performance of aircraft using the ALBATROSS set of solutions is compared with materially similar aircraft that are not. Another methodology is statistical analysis, looking into clustered results, while a third is applying artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to evaluate solutions’ effectiveness.
In the context of a pair of flights, this would include more than two dozen metrics like fuel burn, carbon emissions, non-carbon emissions, airport noise, takeoff noise, approach noise, and other route performance metrics.
At the end of the day, the objective of the ALBATROSS project is to bring everyone around the table, “address all parts of the development lifecycle”, Nuñez says, and to determine “how we can apply the full catalogue of solutions that we have in the real world”.
Author John Walton
Published 27th October 2022
Image credit Airbus
;
