Foundations of a framework to evaluate impacts on future noise situations at airports

Noise emissions in the vicinity of airports are a major challenge regarding the future of aviation. In this work we present the development of a framework to assess the impacts on future noise situations at the multi-event level. The framework at its top-level consists of three main areas: Modeling future airport flight plans, modeling aircraft noise at the vehicle level, and modeling aircraft noise at the airport level, which makes use of the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT). This paper focuses on airport flight plan modeling that derives future flight plans from a given flight plan considering user-specific scenario input. Therein, firstly, air traffic growth is considered. Secondly, the retirement of aircraft is considered by analyzing the age distribution of the current world aircraft fleet and by applying retirement curves for nine aircraft clusters. Thirdly, aircraft introduction is considered allowing for the precise definition of aircraft fleet composition to enter the fleet in future years. Fourthly, a simple capacity module considers airport capacity constraints. The framework does not aim at forecasting actual future flight plans or absolute noise levels, but aims for relative scenario comparisons for the purpose of impact assessments. A use case applies the developed flight plan model to Munich Airport.