Quantifying Reduction in Thermal contrails by Optimising SAF (QRITOS)

Contrails are understood to contribute a significant proportion of aviation's overall climate warming impact. All flights utilising fossil fuel emit CO2 proportionally with fuel burn and therefore contribute CO2-related warming evenly with distance flown. Conversely, warming from contrails is attributable to a minority of flights depending on their flight paths and local weather conditions, meaning that addressing contrail warming can focus on this minority of flights. Multiple contrail management strategies have been proposed including targeting the use of the limited available Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) to flights which are expected to produce the most warming contrails. This proposed contrail management strategy is based on the hypothesis that the combustion of SAF creates fewer soot particles than combustion of fossil jet-fuel, and thus results in contrails with a smaller climate impact. This could be an effective solution to increase the value delivered from SAF and have no impact on flights.

This ambitious and exciting project is a collaboration between Rolls-Royce, British Airways, Heathrow Airport, Air BP and Imperial College London to understand the logistics required to conduct a trial on commercial flights to verify this contrail management strategy based on targeted SAF usage.