Policy summit

This week at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., policy makers and engineers met to brainstorm a few big ideas on how to keep the future of aviation clean and green.

Using some state of the art technology and organization techniques, and a few simple tweaks to the system, NASA is exploring ways to improve the environment, reducing aircraft noise, emissions, and fuel consumption.

According to NASA, in 2009 704 million passengers flew in the United States, a number expected to increase to 1.21 billion by the year 2030.

Accommodating the travel needs for an increased population will require more airports and more flights, along with a substantial increase in engine emissions and noise, along with traffic jams and unknown effects on health and quality of life.

Even modestly better understanding and management of data and flight efficiencies can add up to a broad savings in economic and environmental costs. Made up of projects from NASA's existing portfolio of aeronautical research, the work toward greener flying is not part of a single project, but rather an effort at cooperation between programs. At the Green Aviation Summit, NASA's innovators are thinking big, sharing new ideas to improve the commercial benefits and convenience of taking flight.