Google: AI tool helped prevent heat-trapping contrails

Google said on Thursday that its artificial intelligence (AI) forecasts helped prevent contrails, the white lines that often follow planes in the sky.

The tech giant said in a blog post that it had decided to collaborate with American Airlines in 2023 “to show that pilots using AI-based forecasts could reduce contrails on a small set of test flights.” 

“A 54% reduction across 70 flights marked the industry’s first proof point that commercial flights could verifiably reduce their contrail impact — but identifying the right flights still required hours of manual coordination,” the blog post reads.

Google said through a new study, it had found that its AI contrail forecasts, when implemented in American Airlines’s flight planning software and put to use on 2,400 transatlantic flights, had reduced contrails by a significant amount “for the flights that successfully flew the contrail avoidance plans.”

“There was a 62% reduction in contrail formation rate compared to the control group,” Google added in the post.

According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), contrails occur “when airplanes fly in cold and humid atmospheric conditions and ice crystals form around the particles emitted from the engine.”

Contrails, through their expansions and mergers, can blanket thousands of square miles in the sky and cause heat to stay trapped in the atmosphere, according to Google.

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