The factors affecting pollution and noise social costs of the current aircraft fleet: an econometric analysis

We study the factors affecting pollution, noise annoyance and global warming social costs produced by aviation, considering all the fleet currently operating. We analyze different aircraft-engine combinations, leading to a dataset of about 1,500 different observations, with relvant variability in terms of externalities produced. Our econometric analysis shows that aircraft age is a main determinant of environmental social costs: a 1-year younger aircraft leads to a -0.32% in social costs. We found a complementary relation among pollution, noise annoyance and global warming: the impact of age on them has the same sign. We also show that aircraft size has a positive impact on social costs: this implies that wide aircrafts generate higher costs than medium, small and light ones. On the contrary size has a negative impact on per-passenger social costs. Hence, policy makers, in designing incentives towards a environmentally sustainable aviation, have to decide first which is the main goal: either limiting the overall social costs (i.e., inducing airlines to choose smaller size aircrafts and higher frequency) or limiting per-passenger costs (i.e., providing incentives to adopt higher size aircrafts and lower frequency).