General information
Title: Reporting what pilots can see: a collaborative system for sharing contrail observations across airlines and air traffic management (BI0004)
Supervisors: Professor Marc Stettler, Dr Sebastian Eastham
Reference code: BI0004
Project overview
Contrail avoidance is among the most rapidly deployable climate interventions in aviation, but it asks pilots to accept altitude changes for a benefit they cannot see. Early trials indicate that scaling avoidance will require the engagement of flight crew. Some airlines have established internal reporting, in which pilots record whether a contrail formed, but these schemes remain isolated and none has scaled. Aviation already solves a closely analogous problem for turbulence, where standardised measurements are pooled across airlines, anonymised, and shared back in near real time. No equivalent exists for contrails, and there is no agreement on what would be reported, by whom, or to what end.
This project will design and evaluate a collaborative system for reporting and sharing contrail observations across airlines and air navigation service providers.
Research objectives
The project will:
- Establish, with pilots and their representative bodies, what can realistically be observed and reported from the flight deck;
- Determine what standardised data could be captured automatically, from cameras, position and aircraft state, and what requires human judgement;
- Specify how observations could be standardised, shared and governed between competing airlines;
- Quantify the value of the resulting data for nowcasting, for correcting contrail forecasts, and for verifying avoidance.
Contact
We welcome enquiries from prospective applicants interested in the project or the doctoral programme. Please use the contacts below, depending on the nature of your enquiry.
Doctoral programme related enquires
brahmal-aviation@imperial.ac.uk
Project related enquires
- Professor Marc Stettler
- Dr Sebastian Eastham
