Impacts of the COVID-19 on all aircraft emissions of international routes in South America

Qiang Cui; Yilin Lei; Ye Li; Peter F Wanke

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2022.104865

Impacts of the COVID-19 on all aircraft emissions of international routes in South America

iScience. 2022 Sep 16;25(9):104865. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104865. Epub 2022 Aug 6.

Authors

Qiang Cui¹, Yilin Lei¹, Ye Li², Peter F Wanke³

Affiliations

¹ School of Economics and Management, Southeast University, Nanjing 211189, China.
² School of Business Administration, Nanjing University of Finance and Economics, Nanjing 210023, China.
³ COPPEAD Graduate Business School, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro 999074, Brazil.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on South America's economic development, as well as its international civil aviation industry. This paper seeks to calculate the emissions of six pollutions (CO₂, CO, HC, NOx, SO₂, and PM2.5) from the international routes in South America during 2019-2021 and discusses the impacts of COVID-19 on the emission change. The modified BFFM2-FOA-FPM method is proposed to unify the CO₂ and non-CO₂ calculations. The calculated results' average error rate is about 5.12%. The results showed that COVID-19 affected all emissions, including the number of routes, average flight distance, aircraft configuration, the proportion of CCD phase emissions, average emissions, etc. In addition, some airlines increased the number of flights and aircraft types during the pandemic, increasing emissions. The results give a reasonable data basis for the aviation industry in South America to formulate emission reduction policies.

Keywords: Atmospheric observation; Atmospheric science; Business; Decision science.