The Aircraft Operations Lab is making headlines as researchers María Cerezo Magaña and Manuel Soler Arnedo were recently featured in an in-depth report by the Spanish scientific news portal SINC. The article, written by Eva Rodriguez and titled “Emitir menos no basta, el futuro de la aviación pasa por volar distinto” (Reducing emissions isn’t enough; the future of aviation lies in flying differently), explores how the lab’s work is moving beyond fuel efficiency to fundamentally redesign how aircraft navigate the skies.
The piece of news highlights a startling reality: “two identical aircraft can take off with the same fuel consumption and leave different climate footprints” depending on “how, when, and where they operate within the airspace”.
The Hidden Impact: Beyond CO₂
For decades, the industry focused almost exclusively on carbon dioxide, but as aero-space engineer María Cerezo Magaña explains, “CO₂ is not the entire impact of aviation. In fact, it represents more or less one-third. The other two-thirds are non-CO₂ impacts”. These effects, which include nitrogen oxides and water vapor, are significantly more variable and harder to manage because they depend on “emission altitude, timing, and the atmospheric conditions of each zone”.
A primary focus of the Lab’s research involves contrails—the white lines of condensation left by planes—which act as “artificial clouds”. Cerezo Magaña notes that these clouds “do not allow the heat we have on Earth to escape, but they also do not allow part of the solar radiation to enter,” leading to a complex “balance of warming and cooling”. Their data reveals that “during the night there is more warming and during the day more relative cooling,” with effects being most pronounced in autumn and winter.
Redesigning the Sky with AI
To mitigate these effects, the Lab is participating in European projects like RefMap and E-CONTRAIL (which recently started its continuation phase E-CONTRAIL 2), using artificial intelligence and satellite imagery to optimize flight trajectories. By applying a strategy of selective climate routing to avoid areas prone to persistent contrails, the total impact of flights could be reduced by 12.5% to 21.3%.
Crucially, this environmental gain comes with a minimal economic burden. Manuel Soler Arnedo emphasizes: “We are talking about mitigations of orders of magnitude of 10, 20 or 30%… with increases in operating costs in many cases of less than 1%”.
A Regulatory Turning Point
The timing of this research is vital as the European Commission prepares to require airlines to quantify non-CO₂ effects by 2027. Soler Arnedo views this as a critical step: “Once airlines have strengthened that reporting, that is the lever that then allows us to establish incentive or regulation mechanisms”.
While the transition from theory to practice faces challenges in congested airspaces, the Aircraft Operations Lab continues to use AI tools to find the necessary “balance between operational feasibility, reduction of the climate footprint, and operational costs”.
Read the full article in Spanish at: https://www.agenciasinc.es/Reportajes/Emitir-menos-no-basta-el-futuro-de-la-aviacion-pasa-por-volar-distinto