Research 2026-08-18

Britain will move aircraft over the Atlantic this winter to stop them drawing the clouds that trap heat

Google, NATS, the Met Office, the Department for Transport, Contrails.org, Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge announced Operation Blue Skies on 18 August: a 30-month programme testing whether AI forecasting can stop aircraft from creating warming contrails. Contrails form when a plane crosses a thin band of cold, humid air; the resulting cirrus traps heat, and a small minority of flights causes most of the effect. The programme will use AI models to predict where those bands will sit and route a small percentage of flights around them, then use machine learning and satellite imagery afterwards to verify whether the contrails actually failed to form. Two operational trials of roughly four months each will run on selected evenings and nights in the winters of 2026-27 and 2027-28, in NATS-controlled Shanwick airspace — the eastern half of the North Atlantic corridor, which carries around 10,000 flights a year during the trial hours and accounts for roughly 5 percent of global contrail warming, concentrated between November and February. It is funded through the Department for Transport's ATI programme and industry partners, with Google contributing £1.4 million in kind.

Why it mattersContrail warming is roughly comparable in scale to the warming from aviation's carbon dioxide, and unlike the carbon it stops the moment the cloud disperses — one of the very few climate levers that works in hours rather than decades. The catch is that avoiding those humid bands means flying longer or lower, which burns more fuel and emits more carbon. So the entire idea only pays off if the prediction is accurate enough that very few flights are diverted unnecessarily. That is a forecasting problem, which is why machine learning is here rather than in the aircraft. It is also that rare deployment where the answer can be graded from orbit afterwards: either the contrail formed or it did not. Most claims about AI helping the climate cannot be checked that cleanly, and this one is being set up so that it can be.

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Britain will move aircraft over the Atlantic this winter to stop them drawing the clouds that trap heat

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