OpenSky Report 2022: Evaluating Aviation Emissions Using Crowdsourced Open Flight Data

The environmental impact of aviation has become the focus of increased concerns for policymakers around the world. The recent pandemic provided many interesting case studies on the impact of aviation on the environment. Following the initial COVID-19 containment measures and hard lockdowns, the sharp decrease in aircraft movements caused a measurably improved air quality worthy of further study.The OpenSky Network has acted as an important open data source for aviation research since 2013. In this paper, we analyze one year of fine-grained pre-COVID air traffic trajectories (comprising the entire year 2018) to estimate fuel consumption and pollutant emissions in the aviation industry. We compare this large-scale big data processing approach to a reduced model approach based solely on global commercial aircraft movement schedules collected from airlines and airports, aggregated by a commercial provider.Our study quantifies the impact of commercial aviation on global emissions. The numbers reveal that aviation's CO
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emissions contribute to 2% of global emissions and that commercial aviation contribution remains a proxy for countries' wealth.