✈ How are contrail clouds avoided in real life? 🌥
Raymond Zopp demonstrates how Flightkeys' flight planning software enables airlines to eliminate most climate warming contrails
How does contrail mitigation work in real life? I spoke with Raimund Zopp about this in the first Blue Lines Contrails Talk. I initially wanted to start a podcast, but since Raimund is the innovation director at Austrian flight planning software company Flightkeys GmbH, it made more sense to do the talk on video and let him show how his software is set up to lead planes around the areas that produce climate-warming contrails.
Highlights of the conversation:
Raimund lives in a solar-powered castle! (1:42)
Contrail mitigation is just one more cost factor in flight planning. (5:58)
We only need to reroute very few flights to avoid most contrails warming. (6:46)
Mini-demo of Flightkeys’ contrail avoiding flight planning system. (10:31)
The very low cost of contrails mitigation. (15:22)
What is still needed for contrails mitigation to be adopted worldwide? (19:41)
Raimund’s hopes for the future of contrails mitigation. (24:37)
What surprised me most in our conversation is that Raimund is willing to help competing flight planning software providers implement similar contrail mitigation systems in their software to solve this climate problem as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Flightkeys collaborates with Imperial College London, Breakthrough Energy, Google Research, German Aerospace Center (DLR), and others.
(On a side note: I have always worked behind the camera – never in front, so please bear with this newbie. It’s the message that counts, right?)
(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 contrails mitigation or management – is what Blue Lines promotes and wants to see spread worldwide.)
See you soon.
Joachim Majholm,
Blue Lines
#contrails #contrailsmitigation #contrailsmanagement #flightkeys