Consider contrails when booking your flights?

Simon's video details how Contrails are responsible for a significant proportion of the impact of aviation on the climate. A study with operational data and commercial flight planning software shows re-routing just ~5% of flights could result in a massive reduction (up to -73%) of the impact, for a tiny increase in operating cost (est$1-2/passenger/flight).

You can help by encouraging airlines to adopt these practices or booking low/no contrail flights with those who already are.

Study: Feasibility of contrail avoidance in a commercial flight planning system: an operational analysis

This study leverages the commercial Flightkeys 5D algorithm, developed by Flightkeys GmbH, with a prototypical contrail forecast model based on the Contrail Cirrus Prediction (CoCiP) model to simulate contrail avoidance on 49 411 flights during the first two weeks of June 2023, and 35 429 flights during the first two weeks of January 2024. The utilization of a commercial flight planning system enables high-accuracy estimates of additional cost and fuel investments by operators to achieve estimated reductions in contrail-energy forcing and overall flight global warming potential. The results show that navigational contrail avoidance will require minimal additional cost (0.08%) and fuel (0.11%) investments to achieve notable reductions in contrail climate forcing (−73.0%).

The Contrail Map shown in the video is at: map.contrails.org

This comment on the YouTube has some of the more detailed complexity, but good to hear it is being worked on:

@megasay (on Simon's YouTube video)
I am responsible for contrail avoidance at a major airline. We work in a project directly with Mark Stettler that was in this video. Unfortunately, on the operational side it’s still not as simple as made out to be in this video, especially in Europe. But we are working on it!!!

First, the FMS of the aircraft is not built to handle leaving the cruise altitude and returning which affects the fuel calculations for flights. This is very important especially for long haul flights.

Another is that the European airspace is very crowded, even if we file a flight plan outside of the contrail regions, it’s not sure that we will get the plan accepted especially when Eurocontrol doesn’t accept yo-yo flight plans. Especially east bound traffic from Europe to Asia, there are such small corridors where we are allowed to fly that our “big hit” flights often cannot be touched at all.

We ARE working on it in projects working with airlines, ANSPs, meteo providers and researchers.