Final Report; September 2005

NTL-ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT-Air Quality ; NTL-ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT-ENERGY AND ENVIRONMENT ; NTL-AVIATION-Aviation Energy and Environment ; NTL-AVIATION-Airports and Facilities ; NTL-AVIATION-AVIATION ;

The United States (US) Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Office of Environment and Energy (AEE) has developed the System for assessing Aviation’s Global Emissions (SAGE) with support from the Volpe National Transportation Systems Center (Volpe), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Logistics Management Institute (LMI). Currently at Version 1.5, SAGE is a high fidelity computer model used to predict aircraft fuel burn and emissions for all commercial (civil) flights globally in a given year. This means that the model is capable of analyzing scenarios at from a single flight to airport, country, regional, and global levels. SAGE is able to dynamically model aircraft performance, fuel burn and emissions, capacity and delay at airports, and forecasts of future scenarios. FAA’s purpose in developing SAGE is to provide the international aviation community with a tool to evaluate the effects of various policy, technology, and operational scenarios on aircraft fuel use and emissions. FAA is committed to the continued development and support of SAGE. Although the results from the model have been made available to the international aviation community, SAGE is currently an FAA government research tool and has not been released to the general public. As part of SAGE development, this document has been prepared to provide detailed specifications of the model’s methods, data, and assumptions. The information is provided within the context of using SAGE to develop global inventories of fuel burn and emissions.

Volpe