As socio-technical systems, air transport systems (ATS) have to deal with contradictory requirements. On the one hand, passengers and other stakeholders demand international mobility due to globalization and individualization. On the other hand, young people particularly demand sustainable and energy-efficient, preferably zero-emission solutions. For these reasons, the development of ATS does not only require a profound understanding of the technological potential of future aircraft, it also requires broad social acceptance by the different stakeholders involved. The junior research project targets the latter requirements by empirically analyzing perspectives, demands and needs of human actors who are primarily affected by future developments of aviation and its consequences, namely passengers and local residents at airport sites. Their subjective demands and imaginations situated in certain social orders, life-styles and worldviews play a crucial role in the social acceptance of future innovations and technological chances of sustainable and low-emission ATS and thus should be integrated into fundamental ATS research.
In order to investigate the tacit notions of sustainability which form the basis of engineering approaches and to reveal passengers‘ and residents‘ definitions of sustainability as well as their demands regarding future sustainable air traffic, we utilize ethnographic methods such as shadowing or interviewing in context as well as methods of participatory (design) research. By this, we aim at introducing a Gender & Diversity Studies perspective into the cluster of excellence and make different living conditions, situations and needs of people, which create different mobility requirements, part of the engineering projects within the cluster. In order to do so, we will turn our qualitative findings into quantitative parameters and make them integral parts of optimization models and simulations. This way, they will become parts of decisions regarding the outline of future sustainable air traffic scenarios. Our project contributes to one of the cluster’s fundamental objectives, the development of comprehensive evaluation criteria and metrics for sustainable ATS that serve as a basis for decision-making and anticipating future scenarios. It strengthens the overall goal of understanding the aviation system as a whole.
We would like to acknowledge the funding by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2163/1 - Sustainable and Energy Efficient Aviation – Project-ID 390881007.
Institute for Flight Guidance
TU Braunschweig
Tel. 0531 391 9856
E-mail: s.buchmueller@tu-braunschweig.de
Institute for Flight Guidance
TU Braunschweig
Tel. 0531 391 9896
E-mail: ju.stilke@tu-braunschweig.de