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.

Wasteful spending of public funds, leading to the creation of “ghost airports”, is often described as a regulatory failure and a major deficiency in European State aid control. It is pointed out that decisions to build or upgrade an airport are often ill-conceived, poorly implemented, and without economic justification. This raises the question whether European law, namely its State aid control system, contains inherent flaws or whether the European Commission’s decision-making process can be improved by increasing reliance on objective economic reasoning under the existing legal framework. This article provides an analysis of the decision-making problems leading to failed aid efforts; of the role of the economic approach in State aids; and of the standard of economic assessment required in State aid cases. The article concludes with de lege ferenda postulates.

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.