Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment (LAE)

The Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment addresses a major challenge facing the aviation industry today: understanding and reducing aviation’s environmental impacts. The lab advances our knowledge of how aviation impacts the environment and collaboratively develops mitigation strategies.

Current research thrusts are:
(*) Evaluating the climate and air quality impacts of aircraft emissions. This includes quantifying the impact of airport emissions on near-airport air quality, aircraft cruise emissions on global air quality, and contrails on regional climate.
(*) Developing tools to enable designers, policymakers, and researchers to evaluate policy and design decision’s environmental implications, including a quantitative understanding of uncertainty. These tools are used to inform international policy negotiations.
(*) Environmentally optimizing both ground and en route operations. Examples include developing and testing procedures for minimizing ground fuel burn, computing the air quality impacts of controller decisions in real-time, and developing metrics for the environmental performance of aircraft.
(*) Assessing potential alternative jet fuels that can reduce adverse climate and air quality impacts. This involves assessing the lifecycle environmental impacts of alternative fuel production and use, as well as broader environmental and economic implications.

Among other activities, the Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment hosts the headquarters of the Partnership for Air Transportation Noise and Emissions Reduction (PARTNER) -- an FAA Center of Excellence with participation from 12 universities and 50 industry and government organizations.

The Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment consists of MIT professors, research scientists, post-doctoral researchers, graduate students and administrative professionals. Researchers come to the lab with a range of disciplinary backgrounds including engineering (aerospace, mechanical, environmental, chemical, systems), economics, atmospheric science and chemistry.

LAE was started in 1992 by Dean Ian A. Waitz as the Aero-Environmental Research Laboratory. The lab became host to the PARTNER Center of Excellence HQ in 2003 and was given its current name in 2012.