The Aircraft Operation Lab team participated last week in the 5th ECATS International Association Conference, held from 27 to 29 January in Brussels. The conference brought together leading scientists and experts to exchange the latest research on the formation, evolution, and climate impacts of aviation.
Our colleagues from the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) presented several key contributions, highlighting ongoing research in climate-optimal flight operations.
PRESENTATIONS
• María Cerezo presented “A Multi-Factor Analysis for North Atlantic Extended Formation Flight Trajectories in Commercial Aviation.”
In this study, the full commercial formation flight problem is solved for a realistic scenario and a sensitivity analysis is carried out to bridge the scientific gap between accuracy and scalability to assess the holistic operational, climatic and economic potential of commercial Formation Flight.
This research has been partially funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033, ERDF/EU, and FSE+, under Grants JDC2024-055691-I and PID2024-160887OA-I00, as well as by Universidad Carlos III de Madrid through the program Ayudas para la Actividad Investigadora de los Jóvenes Doctores.
• Abolfazl Simorgh presented “Robust Climate-Optimal Trajectory Optimization Using the Probabilistic Algorithmic Climate Change Function (paCCF) for NOx-Induced Ozone” (A. Simorgh, O. M. Bola, M. Soler et al.).
The results demonstrate a significant mitigation potential of aviation’s non-CO₂ climate impact, while also highlighting remaining uncertainties linked to the ongoing development of the paCCF_NOx model. This work benefits from the F4ECLIM collaboration, contributing to the advancement of sustainable air traffic management.
• Fateme Baneshi, within the framework of the REFMAP project, presented “Network-Level Aircraft Trajectory Planning for Contrail Hotspot Avoidance and Complexity Management Using Constrained Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning” (F. Baneshi, A. Simorgh, M. Cerezo-Magaña, M. Soler).
This work introduces a scalable framework for network-level climate-optimal flight planning, explicitly accounting for interactions across the air traffic management system. By leveraging multi-agent reinforcement learning, aircraft are rerouted to avoid climate hotspot regions while maintaining manageable traffic complexity. Evaluations using real European air traffic scenarios show that climate benefits can be achieved without compromising operational feasibility, while retaining strong computational efficiency.
POSTERS
• Raúl Quibén presented the poster “Toward Climate-Optimal Trajectory Optimization for H₂-Powered Aircraft” (R. Quibén, A. Simorgh, A. Jafarimoghaddam, M. Soler, R. Cavallaro).
This work advances the development of tools for hydrogen-powered aviation trajectory planning. Two case studies compare cost-optimal and climate-optimal trajectories (minimizing contrail energy forcing) of H₂-powered evolutive aircraft against a conventional Jet-A reference.
• Irene Ortiz presented “A Novel Ice RGB to Improve Satellite-Based Contrail Detection over Complex Atmospheric and Surface Backgrounds” (I. Ortiz, H. Brenot, J. van Gent, E. Dimitropoulou et al.).
This poster showcases preliminary results from a collaboration with Hugues Brenot (BIRA), who developed a new Ice RGB composite to enhance contrail visibility under challenging background conditions. Using this imagery, a large-scale analysis of contrail coverage and radiative forcing was conducted, demonstrating strong potential to improve the identification of contrail radiative effects from geostationary satellite data.
• Danial Akbari presented “A Neural Network Framework for Joint Prediction of Ice-Supersaturated Regions and Radiative Forcing Due to Aircraft-Induced Contrails” (D. Akbari, J. García-Heras, A. Jafarimoghaddam).
This work introduces an artificial neural network trained on meteorological data and detected contrails to predict contrail formation within ice-supersaturated regions, together with their long-wave and short-wave radiative forcing impacts. The research is supported by the KAIROS project.
• Xiaoqing Deng presented “Data-Informed Identification of Suitable Formation Flight Pairs under Composite Inviscid Wind Modeling.”
This joint work with A. Jafarimoghaddam, R. Gázquez, and M. Cerezo-Magaña proposes a novel approach to accurately predict fuel savings from formation flying without explicitly solving the optimization problem. The results reveal that geometric features dominate fuel-saving predictions under wind conditions, leading to the development of a bounded indicator for selecting suitable formation flight candidates.
The conference provided a valuable forum for exchange with the aviation–climate research community, fostering discussions on innovative solutions to reduce aviation’s climate impact.
