Post-Flight Analysis of Fuel Consumption

Sammanfattning: The impact of air travel on the climate, along with its increasing share in CO2 emissions haveraised the demand for sustainable air travel solutions. The current aircraft technologies haveseen significant improvement throughout the years. Although, the rate at which new aircrafttechnologies are developed can not keep up with the increased demand for air travel. Hence, adifferent approach to reduce the aviation’s impact on climate can be achieved by optimizing thevertical flight path in order to reduce the fuel consumption, i.e. using dynamic programming.Upon departure, an optimization of the vertical flight path is initiated and an optimal flight planis suggested to the flight crew. The fuel saving produced by the optimal flight plan is a potential saving that can only be fullyachieved if the flight crew chose to fly according to the optimized flight path. However, restrictionsfrom the Air Traffic Control, as well as the flight crew’s willingness to follow theoptimized flight path can affect the achieved saving. Hence, a tool is developed in order tocompute trip fuel consumption from post-flight data obtained from the Automatic DependentSurveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) surveillance technology. A method to identify the start andend positions of cruise segments is successfully implemented. Two methods of calculating thefuel are implemented and compared. The first method is based on simulating the actual flight,which uses the same performance model as for the simulation of the operational flight plantrip and optimized trip. The second method is based on utilizing the ADS-B data to obtain theaircraft speed which in return can be used as a parameter to obtain the fuel flow of the aircraft,hence the trip is not simulated. The results reveals that the simulation method produces flighttrajectories that are comparable to the operational and optimized flight plans since they use thesame model structure. However, using ADS-B data to obtain fuel consumption represents theactual flight trajectory more accurately. Furthermore, an optimization algorithm based on the on-board Flight Management Computeris implemented. According to the results, the FMC optimization offers a sufficient optimizationof the cruise phase, when compared to the OFP trip, however performs worse than the dynamicprogramming, which provides a global optimal solution