Fuel Estimation in Air Transportation: Modeling global fuel consumption for commercial aviation

Accurate fuel burn estimation models are required to assess potential reductions in CO2 emissions stemming from new aircraft technologies. This study provides a novel framework for Fuel Estimation in Air Transportation (FEAT): a two-component approach comprising of (1) a high fidelity flight profile simulator based on the aircraft performance model from EUROCONTROL, and (2) a reduced order fuel consumption approximation with origin-destination airport pair and aircraft type as sole inputs. The latter allows for accurately estimating fuel consumption for global scheduled aircraft movements of an entire year in a matter of milliseconds. We calculate total CO2 emissions from scheduled commercial aviation in 2018 to be 812 Mt. The modeling error of fuel consumption is validated against fuel burn reports and ranges below 5%. Current aircraft performance models either focus on fuel estimation accuracy or on computational efficiency. Combining both, FEAT enables rapid assessment of decarbonization strategies for commercial passenger aviation.