How real a threat to potential climate change are contrails—the trail of ice crystals formed by jet engine exhaust at high altitudes? Only hard data will help answer the question, yet contrails and ...

GE Aerospace is partnering with NASA to carry out a series of flight tests designed to improve the industry’s understanding of contrails. To be performed over the week commencing 18 November, the ...

In a new study, co-authored by Fangqun Yu of UAlbany's Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, a team of researchers found that modern “lean-burn” aircraft engines still produce the conditions necessary ...

Suggested Citation: "1 Overview." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2025. Developing a Research Agenda on Contrails and Their Climate Impacts. Washington, DC: The National ...

Small changes to aircraft flight paths to avoid the atmospheric conditions that create condensation trails—known as contrails—could reduce aviation's global warming impact by nearly half, a new study ...

From the top of a plane wing, another airplane is seen flying above clouds in a blue sky, leaving a contrail in its wake. In spring 2023, scientists aboard a research aircraft chased an Airbus A321neo ...

American Airlines and Google say an AI-powered flight planning system reduced heat-trapping contrails during a large-scale trial on transatlantic routes, with a reported 62% reduction on flights that ...

ALBANY, N.Y. (Dec. 4, 2025) — If you look up at the sky on a clear day, chances are you’ll notice thin, white clouds following behind airplanes— also known as contrails. The formation of these wispy ...

Reducing aircraft soot emissions may not reduce contrail clouds, according to in-flight observations of emissions from a passenger jet with modern ‘lean-burn’ engines, reported in Nature. Contrails ...

TOULOUSE—Airbus is leading a new European research project, including aircraft ground testing, to study how the composition of a sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) influences the formation of 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 ...

Assuming that the radiative forcing impact of aviation-induced contrails is sufficiently strong to justify mitigation measures, it is likely that operational strategies that avoid flying through ...