AI to help planes avoid climate-warming 'sky graffiti'

A £5 million UK trial is set to explore whether artificial intelligence can help airplanes avoid creating climate-warming contrails. Known as "sky graffiti," these icy clouds form when hot exhaust from aircraft engines mixes with cold air at high altitudes, trapping heat that would otherwise escape from the Earth. Scientists estimate that contrail warming could be responsible for up to a third of aviation's climate impact.

The 30-month Operation Blue Skies project, led by Google, the UK government, the Met Office, NATS, and academic researchers, aims to predict where contrails are likely to form and adjust aircraft routes to avoid those areas. The trial will focus on the Shanwick Oceanic airspace in the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which accounts for about 5% of global contrail warming.

Google will use satellite images and flight data to identify past contrail formation and combine this with weather patterns to forecast new contrail formation. This information will be shared with NATS, allowing air traffic controllers to instruct pilots to alter their flight paths by around 2,000 feet - a change already common to avoid turbulence.

The trial will take place during lower air traffic periods in the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, with around 10,000 flights expected to pass through the airspace. Aviation Minister Keir Mather hailed the project as a world-first, showcasing British ingenuity. While changing flight altitude may increase fuel consumption, scientists predict the additional CO2 emissions would be minimal compared to the climate benefit of avoiding contrails.