Sustainability and the Environment
Air Transportation Operations and the Environment
In this work we explore how operational improvements can reduce aviation's environmental impact and make air transportation more fuel efficient.
Payuna Uday, Tiffany Le, and Delri Muller helped classify more than 60 operational improvements. Payuna, Tiffany, and Nicoletta developed approaches to improve the use of taxiways for arriving aircraft.
An end-around taxiway (EAT) provides a path for arrivals to taxi around an active runway, thereby eliminating the need to stop and cross the active departure runway at one of the conventional taxiways.
We investigated the fuel burn and environmental impacts of flying in the troposphere vs. the stratosphere.
![Picture of contrails](../images/homepage-hero.jpg)
![Movement of the tropopause](../images/tropopause.png)
Flight Contrails Over the Southeastern U.S. Picture by Louis Nguyen, NASA Langley Research Center.
Movement of the tropopause. Image credit: NASA