Aviation and the environment

Citation

(1999), "Aviation and the environment", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 71 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.1999.12771cab.007

Aviation and the environment

Aviation and the environment

Keywords Aerospace industry, Environmental impact, Flight

To counter campaigns that call for a reduction in air travel on environmental grounds, such as the UK-based Friends of the Earth's Right Price for Air Travel, the Environment Quartet Group has been formed. The quartet comprises the following UK organisations: the SBAC, RAeS, AOA and BATA, and its aim is to promote the message that air travel is a clean and quiet way to travel.

It also aims to correct public misconceptions that the jet plane is about to overtake the car as the most worrying cause of global warming.

Airbus Industrie is also helping to correct the above misconception by extending its sponsorship of the airborne atmospheric research project, MOTAIC, for another year, and reports that new equipment is being developed to enhance the data the project collects.

MOZAIC, an acronym for Measurement of Ozone by Airbus In-Service Aircraft, is a programme developed at the initiative of Airbus Industrie, in response to scientific requirements for data on how aircraft emissions affect the Earth's upper atmosphere. The data the programme collects are widely used by atmospheric modellers and thus have helped develop the current understanding that aircraft do not contribute to the degradation of the Earth's ozone layer. More than 7,500 flights, totalling more than 45,000 flight hours, have been accumulated. A measurement for the MOZAIC database recorded, on average, once every five seconds.

The programme, initiated by Airbus Industrie and funded by the European Union, involves five A340 aircraft in service with four European airlines: Air France, Austrian Airlines, Lufthansa and Sabena. The airlines carry, free of charge, measurement equipment that take samples of the atmosphere as the aircrafts fly various routes around the world. The equipment, which weighs about 120 kilograms, means that the airlines contribute the weight of one passenger on each flight.

These flights enable scientists to build a "horizontal" map of the atmosphere, versus the "vertical" map which is yielded by traditional measurements, for example, with a balloon.

New equipment that can sample a wider range of data will be available at the end of this year and may be put into service on board the programme's A340 fleet in a third MOZAIC phase starting in 2000.