Hundreds of commercial flights will be told to change their paths over the northeastern Atlantic Ocean during the next two winters to show how minor altitude adjustments can reduce aviation's climate impact. The British government is backing the landmark airspace-scale trial, launched Tuesday, to avoid creating condensation trails, or contrails, per the AP. Google UK is contributing its AI-powered forecasts to identify the contrail regions. When airplanes fly through cold and humid areas, ice crystals can form around the soot particles emitted from the engine, creating clouds that trap heat and warm the planet.
The Shanwick Oceanic Control Area in the North Atlantic corridor's eastern half, the location of the trial, is a busy gateway for air traffic between Europe and North America. It's also a hot spot where contrails form. The 30-month research program known as Operation Blue Skies includes test periods this winter and next, when air traffic controllers will tell some flights to deviate up to 2,000 feet to avoid areas where contrails are likely to form. These will be minor altitude adjustments within standard flight operations, coordinated through established air traffic control communication channels, per the British government.
There'll be about 20 to 40 test days per winter, when there's less air traffic. Around 10,000 flights are expected to pass through the Shanwick airspace during testing, with hundreds of those flights changing routes. That 1% to 5% would be enough to demonstrate a statistically significant reduction in contrail formation on an airspace scale, said Paul Hodgson, Google's technical lead for the initiative. Individual airlines have tested shifting altitudes to avoid contrail regions. Earlier this year, Google and American Airlines announced the airline significantly reduced the climate impact of some flights using Google's AI-based forecasting tool to help prevent contrails.
This new effort expands on individual airline trials to try mitigating contrails across an entire flight corridor. The thin white lines that form behind airplanes are responsible for a surprising amount of Earth's warming—1% to 2%, per the Contrails.org nonprofit. Modeling shows the Shanwick airspace accounts for about 5% of the total contributed by contrails, with a significant amount in winter. A 2020 Imperial College London study found that small changes to flight paths could reduce the climate impact of contrails. Professor Marc Stettler said Operation Blue Skies is a chance to test that idea in the real world, on a scale never seen before.
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