By David Bond – Aviation Week
Commercial aviation, faced with worldwide concerns about greenhouse gases and looming regulations to reduce them, can count on advances in technology that will help to clean up its operations to a substantial degree during the coming 20 years. But growth in air travel, both an enabler and a product of the burgeoning global economy, is likely to use up the environmental gains faster than they can be achieved.
The gains will come from aircraft and engine designers, particularly the latter, as they create and produce the next generations of commercial aircraft—the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787, both scheduled to enter service within a year; the A350, Airbus’s forthcoming answer to the 787, which will lag by several years; and the airframe manufacturer’s successors to their current single-aisle families, which probably won’t reach airlines before the late 20-teens or the early 2020s.
Equally important to greenhouse-gas reduction, major improvements in air traffic management are in advanced stages of planning and early stages of development. The U.S. NextGen satellite-based air traffic management system, Europe’s comparable Sesar ATM research program and adaptations worldwide are intended to increase the capacity of airspace systems to match the growth projected for aviation in the coming decades. In doing so, the ATM upgrades will, in many cases, shorten flight times.
