Delta Air Lines Collaborating With MIT To Reduce Climate Impact

Delta Air Lines has announced that it is collaborating with MIT in an effort to reduce its environmental impact in the form of preventing persistent contrails, which are roughly 10 percent of all contrails and create long-standing clouds that trap heat and ultimately warm the earth.

Citing past trials and simulations, the airline said that about 80 percent of persistent contrails—ice clouds that form when aircraft exhaust brings together the condensation of exhaust water vapor and atmospheric water vapor into a cloud—could be avoided through flight altitude adjustments with minimal additional fuel burn, making contrail avoidance one of the most immediate and cost-effective measures for reducing aviation’s climate footprint.

Contrails form roughly 65 percent of the time at cruise altitude. However, only about 10 percent last longer than a few minutes. The concern is when they’re created at certain times during the day and persist for more than a few minutes as they then trap heat in the earth’s atmosphere.

“While the journey to decarbonizing aviation is uncharted, we know it will take short-, medium- and long-term solutions to reach our net zero goal. That’s why this work is both exciting and critical—it has the potential to make a major impact on our environmental footprint within just a few years,” Pam Fletcher, Delta’s Chief Sustainability Officer, said in a statement. “By making our data and solutions available publicly, we’re encouraging creators, innovators and industry cohorts everywhere to join in our efforts to make fast, lasting progress for our planet.”

“Much of the focus on climate within the aviation field is understandably on carbon dioxide, but contrail avoidance has the potential to greatly reduce the environmental impact of air travel quickly and at low cost,” added Steven Barrett, Director of MIT’s Laboratory for Aviation and the Environment. “This collaboration will help us better understand, predict, and ultimately avoid persistent contrails. Working with airline partners gives us the needed access to flights and operational expertise to conduct successful flight trials.”

The study’s findings and technology will be publicly released and published under an open source license allowing the rest of the industry to take part in studying and curtailing contrails.