New aircraft may be contributing more to climate change than their predecessors by producing more contrails, according to a new study by Imperial College London.
The increase in contrails, the white lines left in the sky by aircraft, is due to the higher altitudes at which modern planes such as the Airbus A350 and Boeing 787 fly to save fuel on long-haul flights.
“This means these higher-flying aircraft create less carbon emissions per passenger” but “create contrails that take longer to dissipate — creating a warming effect for longer and a complicated trade-off for the aviation industry,” Imperial College said in a press release about the research, published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters.
New airliners fly higher than 7.4 miles, while their predecessors typically fly at about 6.8 miles. The study used machine learning to analyze satellite data on more than 64,000 contrails from aircraft flying over the northern Atlantic Ocean.
