🛫 “Contrail Pilots” seek EU funding for large-scale contrails trial 🛬
A consortium with seven airlines aims to eliminate most of the contrail warming from at least 18,000 flights over the next five years.
✈ It’s finally public that a consortium of airlines, tech companies, consultancies, and NGOs (Blue Lines is involved, too) have applied for support from the EU Innovation Fund to initiate the biggest contrails avoidance trial ever attempted.
If granted, the Contrail Pilots project will begin in January 2025 with a year of technical setup. Over the following four years, the intent is to reroute at least 18,000 flights around the cold and humid areas where warming contrails might be created, and thereby avoid significant climate warming.
The goal of the trial is to learn how contrail avoidance at scale will affect day-to-day airline operations, dispatchers, flight planners, air traffic control, pilots👩✈️, and other stakeholders. A trial of this magnitude will also help validate and improve the prediction models used to forecast whether contrails will be created or not.
Many different stakeholders involved
The Contrail Pilots project is led by Breakthrough Energy's nonprofit contrail arm and the aviation consultancy group to70. The consortium also includes seven airlines, two flight planners, scientific institutions, NGOs, and private companies.
Victoria Moores wrote the story in Aviation Week and quoted Blue Lines’ Airline Contrail Index, which tracks all airline involvement in contrail management.
The consortium has applied for about €9M ($9.6M) from the EU Innovation Fund to cover 60% of the project costs. A funding decision is expected in September.
🌎 This is exactly the kind of initiative the world needs. A large-scale trial like this will teach us to avoid contrails in better and more efficient ways and help us figure out how to eventually scale contrail avoidance to include all flights.
(As regular readers of the Blue Lines newsletter will know, contrails are the wispy white stripes that airplanes sometimes leave behind in the sky (made from water vapor and engine soot). Some of these condensation trails can spread out and become high-altitude ice clouds (cirrus), which reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space but also trap outgoing energy in the atmosphere, resulting in a net heating of our planet equivalent to 1-2% of human-induced global warming. However, we can relatively easily avoid most warming contrails by flying around the contrail-prone areas in the atmosphere. This climate solution – often called contrail management – is what Blue Lines promotes and wants to see spread worldwide.)
See you soon.
Joachim Majholm,
Blue Lines