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Aircraft
Published in Suzanne K. Kearns, Fundamentals of International Aviation, 2021
Jet engines entered service in civil aviation in the 1950s and quickly demonstrated their advantages over piston engines. Jets were significantly more powerful and durable than their piston engine counterparts. More powerful engines led the industry into the “Jet Age,” allowing aircraft manufacturers to build aircraft that were bigger, faster, and capable of traveling farther.
Aircraft
Published in Suzanne K. Kearns, Fundamentals of International Aviation, 2018
Jet engines entered service in civil aviation in the 1950s and quickly demonstrated their advantages over piston engines. Jets were significantly more powerful and durable than their piston engine counterparts. More powerful engines led the industry into the ‘Jet Age’, allowing aircraft manufacturers to build aircraft that were bigger, faster, and capable of travelling farther.
Operating a flight
Published in Peter J. Bruce, Yi Gao, John M. C. King, Airline Operations, 2018
The advent of the Jet Age in the 1950s welcomed in a new era in aircraft sophistication, speed, size and reliability. Whilst the early Pratt & Whitney JT3D-1 engines of the B707-120B were, by modern-day standards, underpowered, inefficient and relatively unreliable, these power plants brought with them a new age for air travel. Very quickly, modern technology, from transistor to digital and computer, saw the removal of the flight wireless operator, with this role now absorbed by the pilots. Next, with the new INS (Inertial Navigation System) technology, the navigator’s role came to an end with the introduction of aircraft such as the B747-100. Finally, with the advent of FADEC (Fully Automated Digital Engine Control), further improved engine reliability, and enhancements such as digital engine monitoring and displays, the flight engineer was removed in aircraft such as the B747-400. The cockpit, having been reduced from perhaps five persons, is now a cosy two (excluding augmented crew operations). Compared to the swashbuckling explorer days of Ernst Gann, today’s pilots are not expected to discover or learn or ‘pioneer’ – far from it. Now, airlines, and by far most of their passengers, expect a flight to be a far more sombre, calm and repetitiously banal affair.
Emission-aware adjustable robust flight path planning with respect to fuel and contrail cost
Published in Transportmetrica B: Transport Dynamics, 2023
The aviation industry is growing at a fast and steady pace, with the number of airline flights around the world increasing by 70% from 2004 to 2019 (IATA 2020). The increasing flights, and subsequently the number of aircrafts in the air, resulted in greater fuel consumption and more engine emissions (Owen, Lee, and Lim 2010; Brueckner and Zhang 2010). Typically, aircraft emissions include carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, contrails, and aerosols containing sulphurs and soot. The increase in the number of flights is predicted to cause a rise in the amount greenhouse gases emitted, with the sector estimated to take up around 12% of total CO2 emission from transportation globally by 2050 (Owen, Lee, and Lim 2010). The predicted increase in air traffic will also result in the rise of contrail formations in the atmosphere, and while the impact of contrails and aviation-induced cirrus clouds on global climate change is not yet fully understood by the scientific community, it is certain that their contribution towards the global radiation budget and climate forcing will increase proportionally. The start of the jet age in the 1950s changed the ways of air travel, with planes flying higher and faster over longer distances. Despite the long history of air travel and the introduction of the jet engine, the effects of them on the global environment were not explored until the 1970s, with concerns over the possible ozone depletion, atmospheric infrared and solar radiation scattering within and above the contrail sheets caused by supersonic aircrafts flying in the stratosphere (Kuhn 1970). Investigations on the effects of subsonic aircrafts emissions in the troposphere only started in late 1990s, with national organisations such as NASA and European Commission DG XII starting the Subsonic Assessment SASS and AERONOX (Friedl 1997; Schumann 1997) project respectively, aiming to better understand the effects of nitrogen oxide emissions on the formation of ozone and contrails. This also marked the first-time aviation atmospheric impact assessment switched from landing and take-off phase to cruising phase where the aircraft spends most of the time in. The shift in research focus is due to the characteristics of the boundary layer between the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Air in that location is relatively still and lacks any sufficient means of scrubbing away any unwanted particles and gas such as carbon dioxide. Aircrafts operating in that region will directly emit any materials into the layer, resulting in a build-up of emission particles and gases (Friedl 1997). The location of the emission will also increase their effectiveness in causing chemical and aerosol reaction, such as isobaric cloud formation and ozone generation, which will contribute to climate change.