ForeFlight has teamed with Breakthrough Energy to explore the development of a tool that could help flight planners and pilots reduce contrails, the companies announced this week at EBACE 2024. While early in development, the feature would be added to ForeFlight’s flight-planning suite to provide information on where conditions exist for contrails, enabling operators and dispatchers to determine whether to alter the flight path.
The tool would combine weather forecast analysis, satellite imagery, and other data to model and detect contrail conditions. Luxaviation is working with the companies on the initiative.
ForeFlight is looking at adding the tool into Flight Dispatch with the profile view for planners to help decide whether an altitude change could help them avoid contrails and have the ability to evaluate the tradeoffs between fuel consumption and contrail avoidance, said Kelsey Pittman, v-p of business aviation for ForeFlight. For pilots, ForeFlight is exploring putting this information into the weather briefing in ForeFlight Mobile so they can have up-to-date forecasting and the ability to make last-minute adjustments, she added, calling contrail prediction a natural evolution of the company's product suite.
ForeFlight chief revenue officer Kevin Sutterfield said the data is something that the company’s customers have been seeking to reduce their climate footprint and is important as business aviation continues its sustainability goals.
“We consider corporate sustainability as an integral part of our business strategy and integrate sustainability into our decision-making processes,” added Luxaviation CEO Patrick Hansen.
Robert Fisch, Luxaviation's chief aviation officer, added, “We are proud to be a strategic partner and support its ongoing development. ForeFlight provides an exceptional solution and continuously improves its features, providing situational awareness and an added layer of safety for our operations around the world.”
A recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report has found that contrails account for 35% of aviation’s global warming impact, ForeFlight noted.
Matteo Mirolo, Breakthrough Energy‘s head of policy and strategy for contrails, said contrails are “all about the reaction between the jet exhaust with specific atmospheric conditions.”
Aromatics in jet fuel do not combust entirely and create soot in certain atmospheric conditions. Water vapor freezes around these soot particles creating a condensation trail that can persist for hours in the atmosphere forming a “cloud that normally would not been there,” Mirolo explained. “So very much like greenhouse gas, they act as a blanket covering the Earth…So basically, we're in front of a climate problem that is likely to be as big as CO2.”
Breakthrough Energy has been working on how to solve this problem, using climate science to identify where the contrails would be available.
He noted that there still is a level of uncertainty in this research. “There's a lot of scientific work to be done on how we predict contrails better and how we observe them better,” Mirolo said. “But what matters most is how we find a solution to it. The main thing to resolve this problem is to change the trajectories of airplanes so they avoid these areas of the atmosphere where contrails are likely to form.”
He stressed, however, “We're not talking about changing all flight trajectories.” He estimated that changing just 5% of flights could avoid 80% of the contrails.
Mirolo also conceded that there could be a small cost associated with using a little more fuel depending on the route changes to avoid the contrails. However, research through trials with airlines has shown that the total fuel impact could be as low as 0.3%.
“So that's very low for the flights on which you intervene…Potentially one of the most cost-effective climate solutions out there,” he said, adding, "We need more trials.” Given the flexibility with business and general aviation, he sees significant potential.
The advancements in modeling accurately “offer remarkable opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint of business aviation…These digital tools are going to give pilots and dispatchers the abilities that they've never had before,” Sutterfield said.
He noted widespread adoption of other systems such as electric and hybrid propulsion may be years away, and customers are looking for solutions much sooner. “We believe that these digital tools will give them the best opportunity in the near term to increase efficiency and cut emissions.”
As for the timing of when this may come to market, Sutterfield said the companies are still working out some of the technology but it may be more a matter of months than years. Sutterfield noted that the tool has to show tradeoffs between flying a longer distance and possibly encountering contrail conditions. Longer distances, climbing, and descending, “they all cost” not just from a money standpoint but emissions. “So we want to accurately calculate that.”