Sustainability & Resiliency

The FAA’s Airport Technology Research & Development Branch (ATR) helps advance innovative practices and technologies that improve airports. Our team is hard at work addressing some of our toughest sustainability challenges, such as identifying eco-friendly foam to put out aircraft fires, and creating the airport infrastructure to support new eco-friendly aircraft.

Current Priority Research Areas

• Fire-Extinguishing Foam Replacement:  ATR has been at the forefront of this key area of research, and is identifying an effective and eco-friendly fire-extinguishing foam formula to replace aqueous filmforming foam agents, or AFFF, which are now known to have negative environmental and human impacts. ATR will continue to look for fire-extinguishing foam products of the highest safety and sustainability standards.
   
• Resilient Airport Infrastructure: Research is underway to improve airport response to flooding. ATR is developing tools to help airports determine how to ramp up aircraft operations by evaluating structural capacity of taxiways and runways at airports during and after flooding.
• Solar Lighting at Airports:  Solar lighting solutions offer an eco-friendly, economical alternative to high-cost electrical infrastructure for small, remote, and off-grid airports. ATR research in this area will lead to the development of federal guidance on decentralized solar lights at airports across the United States.
   
• Improved Energy and Resource Use: ATR is developing a tool to quantify energy efficiency and resilient domestic supply chains and support consideration of life cycle energy and resource use efficiency in dicision making.
   
• Autonomous Vehicles at Airports: ATR’s research supports the development of best practices and guidance for the use of electronic powered autonomous vehicles at airports, such as autonomous mowing operations. This will lead to reduced emissions, increased efficiency, and improved safety.