Enhanced Traffic Management System (ETMS) stores all the information gathered by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) from aircraft flying in the US airspace. The data stored from each flight includes the 4D trajectory (latitude, longitude, altitude and timestamp), radar data and flight plan information. Unfortunately, there is a data quality problem in the vertical channel and the altitude component of the trajectories contains some isolated samples in which a wrong value was stored. Overall, the data is generally accurate and it was found that only 0.3% of the altitude values were incorrect, however the impact of these erroneous data in some analyses could be important, motivating the development of a filtering procedure. The approach developed for filtering ETMS altitude data includes some specific algorithms for problems found in this particular dataset, and a novel filter to correct isolated bad samples (named Despeckle filter). As a result, all altitude errors were eliminated in 99.7% of the flights affected by noise, while preserving the original values of the samples without bad data. The algorithm presented in this paper attains better results than standard filters such as the median filter, and it could be applied to any signal affected by noise in the form of spikes

The article presents a method for assessing emissions of harmful substances and noise from road and air transport, as well as a combined assessment of the emissions of these transport pollutants. The original analytical dependencies reflecting the emissions of harmful substances from road transport, developed as part of the EMITRANSYS project implemented at the Faculty of Transport of the Warsaw University of Technology, were taken into consideration, in which the unit values of the actual road emissions of harmful substances are a function of, among other things, route length or speed of the vehicles. However, the dependencies associated with noise emissions were taken from the applicable international guidelines for assessing environmental pollution by traffic noise.

The article also describes a case study in which the impact of Warsaw Chopin Airport on noise along the Warsaw road network and the entire Warsaw agglomeration was assessed. Analyses and discussions were carried out in the scope of the change in transport noise due to air operations carried out in the analysed area. As agreed, the combined impact of road and aircraft noise in the area under study is far more unfavourable than street noise alone. Thus, it can be seen that the assessment of noise levels carried out separately for individual modes of transport (in accordance with applicable regulations) should be supplemented with the assessment of traffic noise from all modes of transport – especially in the case of simulation tests of ecologically friendly changes in the area of transport.

Hardly any sector has been hit as hard by the COVID-19 pandemic as the air transport industry. As lockdown measures are lifted, a recovery phase begins that will shape the global economic landscape for the years to come. In this context this paper raises the question of whether the pre-existing EU instruments for subsidizing air operations – Startup aid and the Public Service Obligation – none of which was designed with economic recovery in mind – can be adapted to the new circumstances after the current ad hoc measures under the Temporary Framework have dried up. The hypothesis which is taken as a starting point is that the existing state aid toolbox has built-in deficiencies which are hampering recovery efforts. This paper therefore attempts to determine whether alternatives can be sought within the confines of the EU state aid law, and if so what such alternatives might be.