by Lacey Pfalz
Last updated: 10:00 AM ET, Thu August 10, 2023
American Airlines published the first findings in a study by Google Research and Breakthrough Energy on contrail avoidance to help understand how to reduce air travel’s environmental impact this week.
Contrails are formed by water vapor condensing on the plane, forming cirrus clouds that remain for hours after an airplane has flown through the area. While they’re not dangerous for existing, and can reflect sunlight back into space during the day, so-called persistent contrails can trap heat and reflect it back onto the Earth’s atmosphere at night.
Because of this, persistent contrails are participants in global warming. They’re thought to be responsible for 35.3 percent of the environmental impact of air travel.
The study in which American Airlines participated tested the possibility of identifying atmospheric zones where contrails are likely to be formed and test if pilots could avoid creating contrails by changing flight conditions.
The project used data in the form of satellite imagery, weather and flight paths, then used artificial intelligence to create contrail forecast maps. A small group of participating American Airlines pilots flew 70 flights over six months using the forecast maps to test whether or not they could avoid creating contrails.
Google Research then analyzed satellite imagery of the flights and found that the forecast maps reduced contrail formation by 54 percent (measured by distance) than traditional flights.
“American is grateful for the opportunity to work with our partners at Google Research and Breakthrough Energy to help advance the science on contrail avoidance,” said Jill Blickstein, Vice President of Sustainability at American. “The results from this small-scale test are encouraging, and, while clearly there are more questions to answer about how to operationalize contrails avoidance across our industry, we’re excited to have played a role in establishing this first proof point. And we’re looking forward to sharing what we learned with stakeholders in the aviation industry and beyond.”
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