A groundbreaking study involving thousands of flights between the United States and Europe reveals that contrails are less frequent when airplanes follow AI-recommended flight paths designed to minimize global warming impacts.

Research indicates that contrails, formed by soot particles from aircraft engines, may cause more warming than the carbon dioxide emitted by airplanes. Certain icy regions in the upper atmosphere are particularly conducive to contrail formation, and AI tools can leverage detailed weather forecasts to identify these areas.

While initial trials suggest rerouting aircraft can effectively reduce contrail formation, this practice has yet to be implemented on a large scale for commercial flights.

Researcher Dinesh Sanekom and his team utilized an AI contrail prediction tool in a randomized controlled trial, examining over 2,400 real-world American Airlines flights.

This study, which included an eastbound flight from the U.S. to Europe, was conducted over approximately 17 weeks from January to May 2025. The flights took place at night, a period when contrails are known to exert a more pronounced warming effect, contrasting with daytime flights that reflect sunlight and create a cooling effect.

Each flight route was randomly allocated to one of two experimental groups. In the first group, air traffic controllers could opt for an AI-optimized route with fewer contrails, while the second group received no alternative route suggestions.

Despite the availability of contrail-optimized routes in the first group, only 112 out of 1,232 flights actually chose a different route due to factors such as costs, safety, and operational constraints, as noted by Sanekom.

AI analysis of satellite images demonstrated that flights utilizing contrail-optimized routes suggested to air traffic controllers saw a remarkable 62% reduction in visible contrails. Overall, considering all flights with the option to select a contrail-optimized route, the effective reduction in contrail formation was 11.6% compared to the control group.

“This validates our hypothesis that this approach can be scaled to enhance contrail avoidance across many flights, provided we can safely and accurately integrate it into existing flight planning systems,” says Sanekom.

Estimates suggest that the overall impact of these flights on global warming was reduced by 13.7% for the entire group employing the proposed routes, with a staggering 69.3% reduction for those using the optimized routes. Fuel consumption showed no statistically significant differences between the groups.

“This methodology appears to be the most effective approach available today,” states Edward Grisspeed from Imperial College London. “The 62 percent reduction in contrails observed suggests this is not a random occurrence.”

However, the intricacies of flight planning make it challenging to predict how much the initial 11.6% reduction might improve in real-world scenarios. According to Grisspeed, “While we cannot simply scale this up to achieve a 60% reduction in contrails on every flight, even an overall reduction of 10% represents a significant environmental benefit.”