Alternate Fuel Vehicles

Evaluating Air Carrier Fuel Efficiency and CO2 Emissions in the U.S. Airline Industry

Zou, Bo
Elke, Matthew
Mark Hansen
2012

We employ ratio-based, deterministic, and stochastic frontier approaches to investigate fuel efficiency among 15 large jet operators (mainline airlines) in the U.S. Given the hub-and-spoke routing structure and the consequent affiliation between mainline and regional carriers, we consider not only fuel efficiency of individual mainline airlines, but also the joint efficiency of each mainline and its regional subsidiaries, as well as fuel efficiency of mainline carriers in transporting passengers from their origins to destinations. We find that: 1) airline fuel consumption is highly...

Capturing the Impact of Fuel Price on Jet Aircraft Operating Costs with Leontief Technology and Econometric Models

Ryerson, Megan Smirti
Mark Hansen
2013

Investigation of the airline response to a fuel price increase is in effect an investigation of the role of variable interactions in aircraft cost models. We examine the impact of fuel price on aircraft costs and airline operational strategies by developing two classes of operating cost models for jet aircraft and comparing the results. The translog operating cost model is a flexible functional form that provides a detailed representation of the empirical relationship between fuel cost and operating cost, allowing for substitution, scale, aircraft age, and variable interactions to be...

Time to Burn: Flight Delay, Terminal Efficiency, and Fuel Consumption in the National Airspace System

Ryerson, Megan S.
Mark Hansen
2014

Improved Air Traffic Management (ATM) leading to reduced en route and gate delay, greater predictability in flight planning, and reduced terminal inefficiencies has a role to play in reducing aviation fuel consumption. Air navigation service providers are working to quantify this role to help prioritize and justify ATM modernization efforts. In the following study we analyze actual flight-level fuel consumption data reported by a major U.S. based airline to study the possible fuel savings from ATM improvements that allow flights to better adhere to their planned trajectories both en route...

Optimal Intercity Transportation Services With Heterogeneous Demand and Variable Fuel Price

Ryerson, Megan S.
Mark Hansen
2014

We examine how fuel price variation resulting from either market forces or environmental policy initiatives affects the optimal mix of services in intercity transportation. We develop analytic continuum approximation total logistics cost (TLC) models of intercity transportation that are sensitive to fuel price, incorporate multiple classes of vehicles, and serve passengers with differentiated values of time. We find that under high fuel prices, the TLC is minimized by effectively segregating passengers on different types of vehicles according to their values of time. Numerical examples...

Landing on empty: estimating the benefits from reducing fuel uplift in US Civil Aviation

Ryerson, Megan S
Mark Hansen
Hao, Lu
Seelhorst, Michael
2015

Airlines and Air Navigation Service Providers are united in their goal to reduce fuel consumption. While changes to flight operations and technology investments are the focus of a number of studies, our study is among the first to investigate an untapped source of aviation fuel consumption: excess contingency fuel loading. Given the downside risk of fuel exhaustion of diverting to an alternate airport, airline dispatchers may load excess fuel onto an aircraft. Such conservatism comes at a cost of consuming excess fuel, as fuel consumed is a function of, among other factors, aircraft weight...

Fueling for Contingencies: The Hidden Cost of Unpredictability in the Air Transportation System

Hao, Lu
Mark Hansen
Ryerson, Megan S.
2016

The aviation community is increasing its attention on the concept of predictability when conducting aviation service quality assessments. Reduced fuel consumption and the related cost is one of the various benefits that could be achieved through improved flight predictability. A lack of predictability may cause airline dispatchers to load more fuel onto aircraft before they depart; the flights would then in turn consume extra fuel just to carry excess fuel loaded. In this study, we employ a large dataset with flight-level fuel loading and consumption information from a major US airline....

Estimating Fuel Burn Impacts of Taxi-out Delay with Implications for Gate-hold Benefits

Hao, Lu
Ryerson, Megan S.
Kang, Lei
Mark Hansen
2017

The aviation community is actively investigating initiatives to reduce aircraft fuel consumption from surface operations, as surface management strategies may face fewer implementation barriers compared with en route strategies. One fuel-saving initiative for the air transportation system is the possibility of holding aircraft at the gate, or the spot, until the point at which they can taxi unimpeded to the departure runway. The extent to which gate holding strategies have financial and environmental benefits hinges on the quantity of fuel that is consumed during surface operations. A...

Improving Airline Fuel Efficiency via Fuel Burn Prediction and Uncertainty Estimation

Kang, Lei
Mark Hansen
2018

Reducing fuel consumption is a unifying goal across the aviation industry. One fuel-saving opportunity for airlines is the possibility of reducing discretionary fuel loading by dispatchers. In this study, we propose a novel discretionary fuel estimation approach that can assist dispatchers with better discretionary fuel loading decisions. Based on the analysis on our study airline, our approach is found to substantially reduce unnecessary discretionary fuel loading while maintaining the same safety level compared to the current fuel loading practice. The idea is that by providing...

Quantile Regression–Based Estimation of Dynamic Statistical Contingency Fuel

Kang, Lei
Mark Hansen
2021

Reducing fuel consumption is a unifying goal across the aviation industry. One fuel-saving opportunity for airlines is reducing contingency fuel loading by dispatchers. Many airlines’ flight planning systems (FPSs) provide recommended contingency fuel for dispatchers in the form of statistical contingency fuel (SCF). However, because of limitations of the current SCF estimation procedure, the application of SCF is limited. In this study, we propose to use quantile regression–based machine learning methods to account for fuel burn uncertainties and estimate more reliable SCF values....

Using Flight Shifting to Mitigate Delay in Multiple Airport Regions

Li, Ang
Mark Hansen
2021

This study aims to improve operational performance of a multiple airport region (MAR) by analyzing interdependent capacity scenarios of that MAR airports and redistributing airport traffic to make more efficient use of the available capacity. We propose to shift flights between MAR airports in order to reduce flight delays. Both the deterministic and stochastic versions of a flight shift model are formulated as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP). The proposed methodology is applied to New York MAR, which includes five airports, using data for the year 2015. The deterministic model is...