Flight Optimization for Contrails and Emissions: A Large-Scale Trade-off Analysis Using Open Data and Models

Emissions and contrails are key factors in aviationinduced climate change, often presenting conflicting objectives in flight trajectory optimization. Previous research typically lacks in optimizer efficiency or in addressing these trade-offs, with limited use of extensive meteorological and flight data. In this paper, a fully open non-linear optimal control flight optimization approach is designed for contrail avoidance and emission reduction, with high computational efficiency. This is achieved by leveraging the most recent trajectory optimizer, OpenAP.TOP, and atmospheric data handling tool, fastmeteo. We present a new compound grid-based objective function that considers both contrails and emissions and introduce four different metrics for evaluating the performance. A total of four months’ worth of data, containing around half a million flights, are gathered from OpenSky for analyses. We show that high levels of contrail mitigation can be achieved, without significantly increasing flight time, distance, or emissions.