Oliver Morton
speaker
275 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 7 Sep
Oliver Morton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
One of the advantages of the North Atlantic as a test region is that it's being continuously looked at by not just one, but two weather satellites.
And they are looking in both the visible and the infrared.
So they're pretty good at picking up contrails.
And part of Blue Skies, quite a big part, is being undertaken by Google, who are using machine learning to make sure that they can actually ascertain which contrails come from which flights and where they go.
the North Atlantic is a good place to do this because by some calculations, the North Atlantic is about 5% of the global contrail problem, but a fraction of 1% of the airspace that aircraft travel through.
The airlines may have a particular view about it that doesn't necessarily represent the common good.
But in general, it's actually, I think, surprisingly cheap.
Flying lower down is slightly less efficient and slightly slower.
So you add a few minutes to a journey time and you may add 1% to 2% to the fuel costs.
But remember, you're only doing this for a fairly small amount of flights.
Researchers at an organization called contrails.org reckon that it's at most 5% of flights you'd have to change and maybe 2% of flights.
And that would give you about 80% of the potential benefits.
Well, it's easy to make if air traffic control measures can be made that will make it safe and reliable.
And
If it turns out that the ways we have of predicting where the places where very warming contrails will form, if those systems work, then it should be fairly easy.
And if that figure turns out to be too optimistic, you'd still for sure get 70% of the cooling with 5% of the flights.
At the same time, airlines are very jealously guarding their fuel bills.
There's another point to bear in mind as well, is that some airlines would end up doing more of this than others.
If you're flying in temperate and subtropical Asia, you are much less likely to make a persistent contrail than if you are flying over Canada or over the North Atlantic Ocean.
It's just the atmospheric conditions are different.
Showing 41–60 of 275 · page 3 of 14
← Previous
Next →