Erhebung der aktuellen und geplanten Maßnahmen zur Reduzierung der Umwelteinflüsse des Flugverkehrs durch Flugsicherungsorganisationen

Significant efforts have been made over the past years to reduce noise impact as well as fuel consumption and pollutant emissions from aircraft operations. Different stakeholders such as airports, airlines, air navigation service providers, and regulatory bodies are tackling this problem from various perspectives in their sphere of influence. Most initiatives for the reduction of negative environmental impacts require substantial resources and are concentrated mainly on a strategic level. On a practical level, for example by changing operational procedures at airports and enhancing the efficiency of air traffic, both on ground and air level, Air Navigation Service Providers (ANSPs) can achieve short-term improvements, which are less expensive to implement compared to solutions at the disposal of other stakeholders. In this regard, the optimisation of airport operational procedures with the aim to reduce noise impact and fuel burn has been well studied over the past decades, and various approaches have been proposed to ANSPs. However, the implementation of possible theoretical solutions into ANSP practice proved not to be as widely spread as expected. Therefore, in this paper, the state-of-the-art regarding current systems, initiatives and practices that ANSPs are following to reduce the environmental impact of air traffic, including the factors of local air quality, fuel consumption and noise emissions is investigated. In order to derive the current state-of-the-art, websites of the European ANSPs have been scraped to extract relevant information material. Subsequently, the extracted text information was systematically prepared and analysed by the usage of various text-mining-methods. The final outcome of this analysis resulted in several specific lists, for each of the scraped European ANSP, showing the currently applied methods and techniques for each of the analysed organisations. All of these currently applied methods and techniques were finally merged into the concluding current state, and allocated into four different categories depending on the type and expected result of usage. The next step focuses on validation of the derived current state. In order to do that, the text mining results were integrated into a questionnaire. The pursued outcome of the questionnaire was to learn from ANSP representatives about the actual currently applied practices, barriers when implementing new or additional techniques, motivational factors, as well as future intentions to include environmental friendly practices in their activities. Considering all these mentioned factors and areas of interest, a comprehensive but holistic overview of the current state should be derived. Different ANSP representatives in Europe were contacted and asked to help with this important study and to share their insights in the questionnaire. As the overall result of this step, the confirmed and validated current state of currently applied methods and techniques in order to reduce negative environmental impacts of air traffic, was derived. Commenting on the suitability of the used Web-Scraping and text mining process in order to reflect the true current state of applied techniques concluded this study. This was done by comparing the expected results which were derived by the usage of Web-Scraping and text mining, with the validated results obtained from the ANSP representatives. In case of discrepancies between the expected and the validated results, Web-Scraping and text mining process was carefully reviewed, starting from the end and working backwards, to identify any encountered issues.