CIFRE PhD Thesis - Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on Aircraft Operational Performance (H/F)

Job Description:

A CIFRE PhD position about Robust Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on Aircraft Operational Performance is proposed in the In-Flight Performance & Operations team within Airbus Commercial Aircraft in Toulouse.

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Mission of the team:

The Mission of the In-Flight Performance & Operations team is to model and evaluate the aircraft operational performance, analyze and simulate the aircraft mission and its environment.

With a constant focus on safety, our role is to improve aircraft and associated services efficiency in order to keep answering our customers needs.

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Your Mission:

While the impacts of air transport on the climate have recently (post-COVID) received particular attention in the research literature, the impacts of climate change on the aviation sector have been studied much less. The impacts of climate change on aviation are potentially multiple: increased ground and in-flight temperatures, changes in wind patterns, atmospheric humidity, increased frequency of extreme weather phenomena (storms, thunderstorms, hail, etc.), impact on the icing domain, increased turbulence, etc. The extent of the potential consequences as well as the lack of literature on the subject underlines the importance of studying these phenomena now, in order to identify, quantify and anticipate the associated risks and costs and ultimately to enable the adaptation of air transport. This is a relatively new subject, with many open questions. The purpose of this thesis is to focus on the impact of climate change on aircraft performance, with the ultimate goal of estimating the economic impact of operating in a warmer climate and anticipating the need to adjust the design criteria for future aircraft.

The objective of the proposed thesis is to develop a rigorous methodology to quantify the impact of climate change on relevant performance indicators, representative of aircraft operations at the fleet level, with an estimation of the associated confidence level and consideration of various sources of uncertainty (greenhouse gas emission scenarios, structural and parametric uncertainty of climate models, natural variability).

This thesis will be held in collaboration with Cerfacs.

After a preparatory work of literature review and identification of variables of interest, the work will focus on producing relevant climate datasets for aircraft performance analysis, setting up the computational chain, then applying them at the fleet level and synthesizing the results. Uncertainty analysis and propagation along the entire chain will then be analyzed.

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