Potential carbon emissions reduction from fleet schedule reconfiguration of China’s and India’s external routes

This article calculates the carbon emissions from China-foreign and India-foreign routes in 2019. The error rate of China’s and India’s external routes is about 2.75% and 5.21%, respectively. First, it obtains the aircraft with the least emission intensity in each distance segment. Then, we use the aircraft with the lowest emission intensity to replace the original aircraft and compare the emission reduction. The results show that after the aircraft is reconfigured, the CO(2) of China-foreign and India-foreign routes has declined by 57.08% and 35.45%, respectively. Interestingly, the average aircraft costs of China-foreign and India-foreign routes also dropped 8.04% and 39.39%, respectively, after the reconfiguration. Therefore, fleet schedule reconfiguration is one of the most feasible ways for airlines to reduce emissions. However, for airlines with increased average aircraft costs, only when the carbon price is eight times the current level can they offset the increase in the average aircraft costs.