Environmental Mitigation Support

Actions to reduce global aviation environmental impact

Metron Aviation possesses extensive experience in developing plans and actions that mitigate aviation environmental impacts.  Environmental mitigation services involve the following activities:

• Causal analysis – Systematic application techniques that uncover the causes of environmental impacts of concern.  This involves identifying the flights or operational behaviors that are contributing the most to the impact of concern.  For example, in the noise area, this is generally related to runway usage near highly populated areas, night operations, larger aircraft, converge of tracks for multiple aircraft in one region, etc.
• Development of mitigation plans – Once the underlying causes have been identified, Metron Aviation uses both analytical and algorithmic techniques to develop alternatives that mitigate the impacts of concern.  This may involve moving routes, changing runway usage, reducing taxi queues and several other possibilities.
• Assessment of mitigation plans – Each mitigation plan developed is modeled for its environmental impacts to ensure that the mitigation objectives are attained.

Highlights of these services as applied in some of our projects include:

Route Optimization for Mitigation Analysis (ROMA) – This project developed a robust algorithmic technique for adjusting terminal-area routing to meet complex noise-mitigation goals, and has been successfully applied in the NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Re-Design and multi-airport metroplex analyses in the Denver area.

Emissions and Noise Total Impact Reduction (ENTIRE) – This NASA project extended the ROMA technique to the more complex domain of both emissions and noise mitigation, concentrating on formulating this as a multi-objective optimization problem.

Environmental mitigation services measure impacts to ensure goals are met.