Comparison of fuel consumption based on fligth data

Abstract

When approaching to an airport, there are different situations that may affect an aircraft’s performance and increase fuel burn, flight time and cost, such as bottlenecks on arrival or hub closures. Airlines must be aware and take these situations into account when calculating fuel quantity on board of aircraft, since fuel starvation must always be avoided due to safety reasons. However, there exist simulations, which can estimate the fuel consumption of an aircraft when landing. An example of simulation is the one created on the Master’s thesis Treibstoffmangel im Anflug durch Kapazitätsengpässe written by Alexander Cocuz in June 2014. This Master’s thesis Treibstoffmangel im Anflug durch Kapazitätsengpässe, which is the starting point of this thesis, describes and simulates the closure of an airport and the deviation of landing aircraft to an alternate airport to land. Providing values related to fuel burn and time, the user could get a rough estimation of the performance of a given scenario, which depends on number of aircraft, their relative position with respect to the scheduled and alternate airport, among others. This simulation can be modified to simulate any kind of scenario. Nevertheless it does not give any clue about its validity and approximation to reality, which is of great importance for a given airline in order to calculate required fuel on board. Then, this Bachelor’s thesis with the tittle Comparison of fuel consumption based on flight data analyzes and compares the given fuel consumption by the described simulation with real fuel consumption delivered by Lufthansa. Moreover it analyzes the validity of the simulation by comparing fuel consumptions between real and from simulation data for three important airports: Munich, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. Assuming if the simulation approaches enough well to reality or not is a decision of the user, since the estimation of fuel consumptions can depend on several external factors and can affect the committed error on the approximation. These external factors depend on type of aircraft, on scenario, meteorological issues, emergencies, etc. Along this Bachelor’s thesis, all the modifications and additional code lines on the original files are detailed, so that the fuel consumption of single aircraft is computed in order to compare with real data from Lufthansa. Then some statistic calculations are performed to approximate fuel consumption difference between reality and simulation, so that it can be stated if the simulation is accurate enough or not.