Your Favorite Contrail News of 2024
🎉 Happy New Year. Here are the Blue Lines stories that got the most views. Hint: you like to read about how inexpensive contrail management is as a climate solution.
✅ Looking through the statistics for Blue Lines’ 16 posts on contrails in 2024, one thing is clear: Our readers prefer hopeful, solution-oriented news:
🥇 The newsletter with the most reads was our April 3rd edition, New research: contrail management is a very inexpensive climate solution, which was all about a new study simulating contrail avoidance on almost 85,000 American Airlines flights in near real-time for four weeks in 2023/24. The conclusion was that contrail management at scale will require minimal additional cost (0.08%) and fuel (0.11%) investments to avoid 73% of the climate warming.
🥈 Second top story was a similar November 3rd post, Contrail Avoidance is Cheaper Than a Cup of Airport Coffee, summarizing a recent T&E meta-study where they analyzed expenses related to contrails management and concluded it will only cost passengers 1-4 euros extra per ticket to avoid the majority of the climate impact.
🥉 Finishing off the top three is our September 3 post, One Airline is Leading the Way and Has Committed to Contrail Reduction Targets 🏆, focusing on Blue Lines’ Airlines Contrail Index, where Delta Airlines currently is the only airline at the platinum tier which requires airlines to have contrail reduction targets. Delta is promising to reduce contrail warming by 80% in 2035 and by 100% in 2050 🎉. These targets are admirable and, we believe, obtainable, and more airlines should follow Delta Air Lines’ fine example.
Happy new year everyone, and here’s to a 2025 with less warming contrails, more trials, more climate action, and lots of engagement from airlines, ANSPs, corporates, climate orgs and climate concerned flyers!
Go to Blue Lines’ educational website to explore contrails in depth.
(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 or contrail avoidance – is what Blue Lines promotes and wants to see spread worldwide.)
See you soon.
Joachim Majholm,
Blue Lines