The Impact Monitor Project is a European initiative designed to develop an impact assessment toolbox and framework, targeting the European aviation sector. The proposed framework is not only aimed at the environment, economics, and operations but also the societal impacts of new technologies and aircraft configurations. The toolbox works by setting out the key steps in the impact assessment cycle and presenting guidance, tips, and best practices. Led by DLR, the consortium includes research institutions and universities that have contributed their expertise and tools to develop the collaborative assessment toolbox and framework. The project defines three use cases by considering three assessment levels: aircraft, airport, and air transport system. This article focuses on Use Case 2 on continuous descent operations (CDOs) at the aircraft and airport levels. It describes the workflow proposal, along with the tools involved. The collaborative approach showcases integrating these tools and using collaborative strategies enabled by CPACS (Common Parametric Aircraft Configuration Schema) and RCE (remote component environment). The list of tools includes Scheduler (DLR; flight schedule simulation), AirTOp (NLR; TMA simulation), Dynamo/Farm (UPC; trajectory simulation and assessment), LEAS-iT (NLR; emissions simulation), Tuna (NLR; noise simulation), AECCI (ONERA; emissions simulation), TRIPAC (NLR; third-party risk simulation), and SCBA (TML; social and economic impact assessment). Interactions with other use cases of the project will be demonstrated via new aircraft configurations stemming from the use case at the aircraft level of the project. The results demonstrate the workflow’s feasibility, the cooperation among the tools to obtain and refine the outcomes, as well as the analysis of the operational scenario of a generic airport, CAEPport, which has been extensively used in previous Clean Sky 2 projects.

Cities are increasingly addressing mobility challenges by restricting road traffic, particularly traditional road vehicles that generate greenhouse gas emissions. As an alternative, unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) are emerging as a promising solution for future mobility, offering fast, quiet, cost-effective and environmentally friendly operations. For last-mile delivery, small drones operating at low altitudes are considered especially promising and are already being deployed in some urban areas. According to the EU Drone Strategy 2.0, drone services could generate a market of 14.5 billion and create 145,000 jobs in Europe by 2030. As this sector is still in its early stages, there is a significant uncertainty about the optimal organisation of urban air traffic. In this paper we present a realistic prognosis of how unmanned traffic over a city will utilise the urban very-low-level airspace and assess it using two concepts of operations, with non-structured or structured airspace, both aiming to facilitate the coexistence of competitors sharing the same urban low level airspace. The two concepts are evaluated with delivery operations at scale for a large and densely populated European city. Results for a normalised scenario of 3500 daily operations show that structured airspace produces more conflicts than non-structured airspace (e.g., 316 vs. 54, respectively), and that only for the non-structured airspace can all conflicts be solved with a simple strategic altitude reassignment (vs. 10% of unresolved conflicts for structured airspace). The artificial organisation of slim urban airspace may limit the scalability of business delivery while not reducing the conflict rate.

Performing orbital insertion around Mars using aerocapture instead of a propulsive orbit insertion manoeuvre allows to save resources and/or increase the payload mass fraction. Aerocapture has never been employed to date because of the high uncertainties in the parameters from which it depends, mainly related to atmospheric density modeling and navigation errors. The purpose of this work is to investigate the feasibility of aerocapture at Mars with an innovative deployable drag device, whose aperture can be modulated in flight, and assess the effects of the main uncertainties on the success of the manoeuvre. This paper starts with the presentation of a parametric bi-dimensional analysis of the effectiveness of aerocapture, for which a wide range of uncertainty levels in the atmospheric density and the ballistic coefficient are considered. Then, an application to a real mission scenario is carried out including the error of the targeting manoeuvre performed at the limit of the sphere of influence of the planet. The analyses show the strong influence of the uncertainties in the atmospheric density and the ballistic coefficient, which significantly narrow the solution space and limit its continuity. However, viable solutions for aerocapture can still be identified even in the worst conditions.