Efficacy of Scalable Airline-led Contrail Avoidance

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that airline dispatcher-led contrail avoidance, integrated into standard flight planning, can significantly reduce contrail formation without increasing fuel consumption, using a scalable workflow validated by satellite data.

Contribution

It introduces a scalable, airline-integrated workflow for contrail avoidance and provides empirical evidence of its effectiveness through a randomized control trial.

Findings

11.6% reduction in contrail formation for eligible flights

62.0% lower contrail formation in planned contrail avoidance flights

No significant increase in fuel usage observed

Abstract

Contrails account for a large portion of aviation's contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Navigational contrail avoidance is a promising solution to mitigate the warming caused by contrails. Prior trials testing navigational contrail avoidance have relied on bespoke integrations of contrail forecasts into airline operations. Here, we use a randomized control trial to test the feasibility of dispatcher-led contrail avoidance integrated into standard flight planning operations using a workflow that scales to an airline's entire network. We validated the efficacy of this intervention using satellite imagery and an automated flight-contrail attribution algorithm. Using this system, we observed an 11.6% reduction in contrail formation rate for the 1232 flights marked as eligible for contrail avoidance (intent-to-treat) relative to the flights in the control group (p = 0.011). In the 112 flights that flew contrail avoidance as planned (per-protocol flights), we observed a 62.0% lower contrail formation rate relative to the flights in the control group (p < 0.001). No statistically significant difference in fuel usage was observed between the two groups.