Last January 28-30, 2025 two of our researchers recently participated in the Towards Sustainable Aviation Summit in Toulouse, France. This prestigious conference brought together experts from around the world to discuss how the aviation industry can achieve carbon neutrality by 2050 through innovative aircraft design and operational improvements.
Abolfazl Simorgh and Oumarou M. Bola contributed to this critical conversation with a poster titled Climate-Optimized Flight Planning & Sustainable Aviation Fuels. The research presented under the RefMap project explored how aviation can mitigate both CO2 and non-CO2 effects through the combined use of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF) and optimized flight planning.
Key Takeaways from Our Research:
- SAF reduces soot emissions, shortening contrail lifetime, thus reducing contrails climate effects. Therefore, limited avialability of SAF in short term should be targeted to flights creating strongly warming contrails.
- Smartly using SAF can lead to a 30-40% higher reduction in contrails climate effects for both cost-optimal or climate-optimal routing options.
Using tools like the CoCiP model from the pycontrail library and our recently developed ROOST library for trajectory optimization, we showcased how climate-friendly routing strategies can complement SAF adoption to achieve more sustainable air travel.
For more details about the event, visit: Towards Sustainable Aviation Summit.