Efficacy of Scalable Airline-led Contrail Avoidance
Abstract
Contrails account for a large portion of aviation's contribution to anthropogenic climate change. Navigational contrail avoidance is a promising solution to mitigate the warming caused by contrails. Prior trials testing navigational contrail avoidance have relied on bespoke integrations of contrail forecasts into airline operations. Here, we use a randomized control trial to test the feasibility of dispatcher-led contrail avoidance integrated into standard flight planning operations using a workflow that scales to an airline's entire network. We validated the efficacy of this intervention using satellite imagery and an automated flight-contrail attribution algorithm. Using this system, we observed an 11.6% reduction in contrail formation rate for the 1232 flights marked as eligible for contrail avoidance (intent-to-treat) relative to the flights in the control group (p = 0.011). In the 112 flights that flew contrail avoidance as planned (per-protocol flights), we observed a 62.0% lower contrail formation rate relative to the flights in the control group (p < 0.001). No statistically significant difference in fuel usage was observed between the two groups.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.06909,
title = {Efficacy of Scalable Airline-led Contrail Avoidance},
author = {Tharun Sankar and Thomas Dean and Tristan Abbott and Jill Blickstein and Alejandra Martín Frías and Mark Galyen and Rebecca Grenham and Paul Hodgson and Kevin McCloskey and Alan Pechman and Tyler Robarge and Dinesh Sanekommu and Aaron Sarna and Aaron Sonabend-W and Marc Stettler and Raimund Zopp and Scott Geraedts},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.06909},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
25 pages, 8 figures, 6 tables. Submitted to JECATS