I was working on a story last week about advances in GPS technology and how they could help reduce the carbon emissions associated with air travel, mostly because planes could fly more direct routes and flight times could be accurately set, which would streamline take-offs and landings. The tech is reasonably interesting, but more so was the takeaway from one of the experts I spoke with who noted that actually the U.S. could drastically reduce air travel-related emissions simply by setting capacity limits at airports.
“In Europe there are capacity limits at airports and the airlines essentially decide amongst themselves who flies which routes at which times and those schedules are always within the capacity limits of the airports,” explains Lance Sherry, Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Center for Air Transportation Systems Research at George Mason University. “To do that, they forego a bit of competition. Airline representatives will get together and say you take the noon flight, we’ll take the 1pm flight and so on, so they’re still competing, just not at exactly the same time. In the U.S., because of the preference for antitrust and competition laws, airlines are free to schedule flights for whatever time you want. So everyone schedules flights for the most popular slots and you basically wind up with traffic.”
Indeed. According to Sherry, if you go to Houston airport at 4pm on any given day, Continental has about 40 flights scheduled to take off between 4 and 4:15. The airport doesn’t have enough runways to accommodate them, so most of the flights spend a lot of time idling on the runway, spewing emissions basically so Continental can sell tickets.
The point is that all this new tech is supposed to streamline air travel to reduce emissions. In Europe, where flights have to wait sometimes or land in phases, it’s largely a coordination problem caused by the fact that air traffic control systems are out of date. In the U.S., however, while modernized air traffic control would help reduce in-flight emissions because pilots could fly more direct routes and have the flexibility to take advantage of tail winds, emissions associated with inefficient landing and take-off, as well as those associated with planes idling on the runway, won’t be solved unless capacity limits are set or all of our airports get a whole lot bigger.
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