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In February, ICAO's Committee on Aviation Environmental Protection agreed to a new noise standard for new-design aircraft entering into service in 2017 (and for lower-weight aircraft entering into service in 2020).
A study recently published by Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center, provides a deeper understanding of the broader trends that impact the severity of runway incursions. Runway incursions, which are the unauthorized presence of vehicles, pedestrians, or aircraft on runways, can...
Wake turbulence—the disturbed air immediately behind an aircraft—is potentially hazardous to following and nearby aircraft if not operationally accounted for. To ensure safety, wake separation standards are devised to alleviate the adverse effect of wake turbulence. This has increasingly become...
The findings from a decade of wake turbulence research are helping reduce airport delays, shorten final approaches to airports, and reduce fuel burn and emissions. Wake turbulence, the movement of air created by an aircraft in motion, may be an esoteric field of study, but the body of knowledge...
In August, over 100 representatives from the airline industry and government gathered for the Air Transport Association's communications and navigation information exchange. Hosted for the third year by Volpe, The National Transportation Systems Center, in Cambridge, Massachusetts,...
The sun is shining, skies are clear, and you remember seeing a weather map free of storms. Yet your flight sits on the taxiway for what seems to be a long time, queued for takeoff. A recent study completed for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suggests that your delay is likely caused by...
To reduce the probability of airport accidents, Volpe recently completed the technical performance on-site testing of a new low-cost ground surveillance system at Manchester-Boston Regional Airport.
For a number of years after the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) was created in 2002, the agency generally screened all passengers in the same way, following a model of risk-based security that screened general passengers to the same degree as elected officials or travelers with top-...
The aviation community is taking on ambitious goals for alternative jet fuels, tackling complex scientific, economic, and environmental issues to find sustainable alternatives to petroleum in the near future.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and Volpe are poised to launch a new environmental analysis tool that will offer a robust, integrated way to quantify the environmental impact of aviation—from a single flight up to full-scale global impacts.