What is it about?

COVID-19 pandemic drastically reduced air travel in 2020, causing existing future CO2 emission predictions from commercial aviation to become obsolete. This paper estimates the changes in future CO2 emission predictions, considering several possible paths for air travel recovery to pre-COVID-19 (2019) levels.

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Why is it important?

This work addresses the uncertainty about how the pandemic will impact airline operations (and subsequently emissions - mainly CO2) in the future. The results show that the future fleet-level CO2 emissions for all the projected demand recovery scenarios are lower than the baseline (no COVID-19) case for all years from 2022 to 2050.

Perspectives

Going by the projected CO2 emission trends discussed in this paper, the rapid introduction of advanced technology aircraft, like all-electric, hybrid-electric, or hydrogen-electric aircraft, combined with the early retirement of older generation aircraft seems to have the potential to further lower future CO2 emissions from commercial aviation. This could lead us closer to IATA’s aviation emission goal of cutting net CO2 emissions to half of their 2005 values by 2050.

Samarth Jain
Purdue University

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This page is a summary of: Estimating the Impact of Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) on Future Fleet-level CO2 Emissions and Airline Operations, July 2021, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2021-2343.
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