An industry standard for calculating the cost of flight delays, created by University of Westminster researchers, is helping to cut aviation’s global carbon emissions.
When you consider that shortening a flight by one minute prevents an estimated 100+ kg of CO2 from entering the atmosphere, it is hard to overstate the environmental benefits of tackling global flight delays.
Led by Professor Andrew Cook, Westminster’s ATM (Air Traffic Management) Group has created standard aviation delay cost values, which are helping to do just that.
The values feature in a report that European practitioners and policymakers have been using since 2004, with several significant updates to ensure that they reflect the latest operational costs.
Alongside improving customer experience and saving costs, the ATM Group’s report is helping to make the entire industry more sustainable.
Influencing EU Air Traffic Control policy
The report’s original commissioner, EUROCONTROL (the European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation), calls it “the most recent and comprehensive appraisal of the cost of delays in the air traffic management system in Europe”.
The ATM Group’s research is incorporated into EUROCONTROL’s annual ATM Cost-Effectiveness (ACE) benchmarking report, used by airports and airlines across Europe.
The published values directly influenced the European Commission’s binding flight delay targets on all European states (Implementing Regulation [EU] No 390/2013).
Based on the ATM Group report’s calculation of delay costs, the commission imposed a network average target of no more than half a minute per flight, with fines for non-compliance.
As well as increasing efficiency, this measure limits additional CO2 released during delays
The regulation was updated in 2019 and remains in operation.
Clean Sky 2 projects with industry
Flight disruption can produce very negative economic impacts.
The delay associated with a late flight can lead to an expensive curfew breach at the end of that day, often imposed for environmental reasons, while passengers may miss connections due to even small arrival delays.
Recovering delay generates a cost (usually as extra fuel) and an environmental impact (as less fuel-optimal trajectories are operated).
The cost of delay report by the University of Westminster is paramount to assessing the real impact of alternatives available to airlines and flight crew.
A shorter than planned route might absorb the initial delay without requiring extra fuel. A flight delay recovery action might be ineffective due to holding on arrival, which can result in extra CO2 production.
These operational challenges are recognised by industry.
For this reason, airlines such as Vueling, SWISS, Norwegian, Lufthansa, Air Baltic, and stakeholders such as the European Network Manager (EUROCONTROL) are supporting the Westminster-led ‘Pilot3’ and ‘Dispatcher3’: Clean Sky 2 research and innovation projects.
These projects aim at using advance optimisation and machine learning techniques to support ATM decision making by airlines and flight crew.
Helping SESAR mitigate flight delays
The €1.6bn SESAR 2020 (Single European Sky ATM Research) project’s cutting-edge research aims to improve European aviation and air traffic control.
The group’s research has informed many SESAR projects, including the ongoing EUROCONTROL-led User Driven Prioritisation Process (UDPP) project, which aims to mitigate flight delays using a new prioritisation system, based on user preferences.
Westminster made important contributions to the project’s early design with its standard aviation delay cost values being central to the UDPP cost models.
Based on its trial run at Zurich Airport, EUROCONTROL has estimated the UDPP initiative can reduce flight delay costs by more than 40%, without impairing airports’ overall performance.
As well as saving money, reducing delays on this scale may prevent tonnes of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere on a daily basis.
Westminster’s ATM Group is currently leading SESAR’s ‘BEACON’ project (with EUROCONTROL as a partner) which is assessing further potential enhancements of the prioritisation system with industry stakeholders, including airlines.
Reducing Australia’s carbon footprint
The ATM Group’s cost reference values played a substantial role in the decision by Airservices Australia (the Australian air navigation service provider) to fully integrate the Metron Traffic Flow system into its ground delay programme.
Following the values in its cost-benefit analysis, PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC) found Metron’s flight delay reductions contributed to an estimated $27.3M maintenance costs saving, across four Australian airports already using it, during the period assessed.
Reducing flight delays doesn’t just reduce emissions released into the atmosphere, it also further reduces aviation’s wider carbon footprint by limiting repairs needed and potentially prolonging aircraft and component lifetimes.
On this basis, the report fully endorsed “the continued rollout of Metron across domestic airports”, a recommendation the Australian service provider followed.
Once again, Westminster’s cost reference values helped to bring about change, which will save financial costs and carbon emissions, while improving the customer experience.
It is also another example of the ATM Group’s growing global influence on this issue.
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