AI to help planes avoid climate-warming 'sky graffiti'
BBC News ● Covered by 2 sources
UK is testing AI to steer planes around the icy contrail clouds that trap heat. A £5m trial over the North Atlantic could cut a chunk of aviation's climate impact with just small altitude tweaks.
Based on reporting by BBC News — read the original for the full story.
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Contrails, those white lines planes leave behind, aren't just pretty sky graffiti — a phrase Google's Paul Hodgson borrowed from his five-year-old. They're ice clouds that trap heat, and Hodgson reckons they're behind something like a third of aviation's climate warming. Nobody has an exact figure, but as he put it, the problem sits somewhere between quite large and very large.
So the UK government, Google, the Met Office, air traffic control body NATS, and researchers from Cambridge and Imperial College London are teaming up on Operation Blue Skies, a 30-month, £5m trial. It's focused on Shanwick Oceanic airspace, the eastern chunk of the North Atlantic corridor that alone accounts for roughly 5% of global contrail warming. Google will crunch satellite images and flight data to spot where contrails have formed before, layer that against weather patterns, and hand predictions to NATS controllers, who can then nudge pilots away from the danger zones.
The fix isn't dramatic. Mostly it means shifting altitude by around 2,000ft, something planes already do routinely to dodge turbulence. Ian Jopson of NATS says it should feel like business as usual for operators on the North Atlantic. Testing runs during quieter evening and night slots across the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, with an estimated 10,000 flights passing through — though only a slice of those will actually need to alter course for contrail avoidance.
There's an obvious catch: climbing or descending burns more fuel, so does dodging one climate problem just create another? Hodgson says earlier trials suggest the fuel penalty is tiny, under 1%, next to the warming a persistent contrail can cause. Blue Skies modelling points to roughly 100kg of extra fuel per aircraft that has to fully deviate. Past airline-level trials, he says, cut contrail formation or warming by something like 60-70%.
The Department for Transport is putting in £2.65m, with Google contributing £1.4m in AI research, engineering and computing. Aviation minister Keir Mather called it British ingenuity leading the way. Results are meant to be published and put through proper scientific scrutiny, which matters given the government is simultaneously backing airport expansion — meaning any climate wins here need to hold up against a growing amount of flying.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Nudging planes by 2,000 feet to stop invisible heat-trapping clouds sounds almost too easy, which is exactly why it's worth watching closely — cheap, low-drama fixes like this rarely get the attention they deserve next to flashier climate tech. The irony that Google is running the numbers while also building power-hungry data centres shouldn't be ignored, but if the fuel penalty really is under 1% against a much bigger warming cost, this is the kind of unglamorous engineering that actually moves the needle, unlike most climate promises tied to expanding air travel.
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