At Think we understand the needs of the UK CAP1616 airspace change process particularly when it comes to quantification of the economic impacts of airspace changes. In particular, clients often struggle with the WebTAG compliant quantification of an airspace’s environmental impacts. This is not necessarily a straightforward activity and can, depending upon the complexity and scope of airspace change, require consideration of specific airframe-engine configurations, fleet development over time as well as being able to work out which emissions are already offset (through e.g. an Emissions Trading Scheme) and therefore out of scope versus those that must be included.

From supporting clients, we recognised at an early stage the need for a flexible and rapid approach to go from an airspace design to a set of financial values that can be used to feed the mini-CBA’s expected by the CAA. Hence, we developed a highly automated process to take a set of designs produced for an airport and to quantify the economic aspects in a format suitable for direct inclusion in a CAP1616 options appraisal matrix. This can include, depending upon the complexity of the ACP, noise and fuel burn modelling using high quality tools such as AEDT for modelling noise and emissions and AirTOP/Bada for the most accurate fuel burn estimates. Our Think approach to the CBA aspects already incorporates the logic for the quantification of noise and emissions factors.