The environmental impact of aviation has become the focus of increased concerns for policymakers around the world. The recent pandemic provided many interesting case studies on the impact of aviation on the environment. Following the initial COVID-19 containment measures and hard lockdowns, the sharp decrease in aircraft movements caused a measurably improved air quality worthy of further study.The OpenSky Network has acted as an important open data source for aviation research since 2013. In this paper, we analyze one year of fine-grained pre-COVID air traffic trajectories (comprising the entire year 2018) to estimate fuel consumption and pollutant emissions in the aviation industry. We compare this large-scale big data processing approach to a reduced model approach based solely on global commercial aircraft movement schedules collected from airlines and airports, aggregated by a commercial provider.Our study quantifies the impact of commercial aviation on global emissions. The numbers reveal that aviation's CO₂ emissions contribute to 2% of global emissions and that commercial aviation contribution remains a proxy for countries' wealth.

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The year 2020 had been selected by EU and US regulators as the deadline for ADS-B compliant Mode S transponders, following various iterations of ADS-B and Mode S services. It will also be remembered as marking a profound change in civil aviation, when the global virus outbreak triggered an unprecedented slowdown in traffic and brought immense impact on the world economy. Fleets have been grounded and a great number of airplanes went into long-term storage due to travel restrictions. The OpenSky Network has been collecting valuable information regarding ADS-B compliance since 2017. It also acted as an important open data source for studying the aviation industry during these crisis times. In this paper, we analyze years of data collected by the OpenSky Network to provide an overview of the past and current situations in global air traffic with equipage updates, ADS-B implementation, Mode S interrogation practices, and fleet management by airlines.@en