A UK-backed consortium including Google, NATS, the Met Office, Contrails.org, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge has launched Operation Blue Skies, a 30-month trial to test AI-driven contrail avoidance across an entire oceanic airspace for the first time. The programme covers Shanwick airspace, the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, through which around 10,000 flights pass annually during trial hours and which Google estimates accounts for roughly 5% of global contrail warming.
The trial consists of two operational phases of about four months each. Google UK is building the machine learning models used to forecast where persistent, warming contrails will form, combining this with satellite imagery to verify outcomes. NATS will manage airspace operations, air traffic control coordination, safety assessment and controller training, issuing small route deviations to a limited subset of flights that would otherwise cross contrail-sensitive regions. The Met Office is developing a dedicated UK contrail forecasting capability, while Contrails.org leads forecast evaluation and trial design, and the two universities will independently verify the climate impact.
Funding comes from industry partners and the Department for Transport via the ATI Programme, with Google contributing £1.4 million in kind through AI expertise, engineering time and computing resources rather than taking grant funding itself.
The work builds on earlier trials with American Airlines, EUROCONTROL and FlightKeys, which Google says demonstrated that contrail avoidance is operationally feasible within normal flight planning. Contrails are estimated to contribute about a third of aviation's total climate impact.
Source: Aerospace Testing International — read the original article