An Empirical Analysis of the Aircraft Emissions by Operating from Scheduled Flights within the Domestic Market in Spain

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, civil aviation has substantially reduced its environmental impact to augment sustainable transportation. In Spain, the domestic market has been habitually characterized by a few enterprises providing air transport services linked to scheduled flights on domestic corridors. Because of geographic diversity and the highly concentrated population characterizing this southern European country, many of them could not be supplied by alternative transport modes in terms of both time and distance by comparison with air transportation. For air quality monitoring from 139 national corridors, this paper aims to study related aviation emissions to conduct an economic analysis in terms of positive or negative externalities. For such purposes, the study focused on these domestic routes served by the five most important Spanish airports, specifically on the number of passengers transported from 2011 to 2020. Up to 10 aircraft types representing no more than 89% of regular operations on these flyways were subsequently identified. In addition, certain engine types also were selected as representatives to evaluate their emissions, depending on the great-circle distance in each route. The research findings, though particularly conditioned by aviation peculiarities of such a domestic market, point decisively to significant dependence upon emissions in connection with the seasonality of the demand and the concentration of flights with low occupancy indices from any one of them. Results suggest that airlines would benefit from operating turboprops instead of turbojets on selected routes, especially when oil prices are high. However, it is not always easy to find a balance between uncompromising economic profitability and effective fleet availability, since nowadays air transport undertakings tend to unify their fleets by using a few aircraft families, mostly powered by jet engines, apart from regional carriers.