This paper was written in the course of the ALAQS project (Airport Local Air Quality Studies) held by EUROCONTROL since 2003. The ALAQS project aims at defining best practice for conducting airport emission inventories and dispersion studies. As a consequence, a test bed toolset was developed: ALAQS-AV. One of the advantages of ALAQS-AV is its high flexibility which allows conducting emission calculations with various methods within the tool. Furthermore, ALAQS-AV output is expected to provide reliable input fora wide range of dispersion models: Gaussian, Lagrangian and Eulerian. Theobjective of this study was to estimate the impact of an aircraft take-off weight on its take-off and climb-out emissions, which occur in the vicinity of airports and influence the airport local air quality. Obviously aircraft weight influences engine performances, which result in different climb profiles to reach an altitude of 3000 ft. The 3000 ft limit is a commonly accepted limit altitude for airport emission inventories. It is obviousthat the greater the weight of an aircraft and the longer the time it takes to reach 3000 ft. However this is not considered in most actual air quality tools. take off weight for widely used aircraft types (Yak 40, Boeing747-400 and 767-300, Tupolev Tu-134, Airbus A320, ). Quantities emitted of CO, HC, NOx, PM10 are calculated and compared as well as the geographical extent of the exhaust areas. The climb profiles used in this study originated from the INM tool (Integrated Noise Model, FAA) which is used worldwide for noise estimations at airports. They were implemented in the ALAQS-AV tool, developed on behalf of EUROCONTROL, to estimate airport emissions. Results proved that the impact of take off weight on climb emissions is significant. In the worst case, emissions of NOx are almost doubled. Thehorizontal extent of the pollution goes from ~5 km to ~10 km for large jet aircraft. For the covering abstract see ITRD E135582
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