The problem
Most contrails vanish. A few do the damage.
Aviation warms the planet two ways: the carbon dioxide it emits, and the contrails it leaves behind.
The white trail behind a plane is a contrail, short for condensation trail: ice crystals formed when hot exhaust hits cold air. Most fade within minutes. The ones that linger spread into thin cirrus clouds that trap heat beneath them for hours.
The fix
The fix is a few thousand feet of altitude.
Lingering contrails form only in narrow trigger zones, patches of sky that are both cold and humid.
Roughly 1 in 10 flights passes through one, and those few flights cause around 80 percent of the impact.
A flight that climbs or descends to avoid a trigger zone leaves no lasting contrail. Airlines already make that maneuver to avoid turbulence, using the flight planning systems they fly with today.
The opportunity
Scale, cost, payoff, readiness. Few climate solutions clear all four today.
- Scale Up to half of aviation's climate impact in play
- Cost $2 to avoid as much warming as a tonne of carbon dioxide, which costs airlines about €75 to emit in Europe
- Payoff Hours from the maneuver to the warming avoided
- Readiness Uses today's planes no redesigns or new fuels, and airlines are already running demos on real flights
The bottleneck
The maneuver works. Aiming it is the challenge.
Weather models are built to track storms, not the thin humid layers where contrails linger. In a sample checked against satellite observations, about two thirds of forecast warnings turn out to be false alarms. Sharpen the forecasts and every reroute counts.
What we do
Start with eyes on the sky.
Airlines, forecasters, and research groups are running the essential trials that put avoidance in the air. Simply Sky is the upstream sister effort to that work, backing what avoidance needs to reach every flight. It starts with observation: the eyes to aim contrail avoidance and the evidence to scale it.
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Sensors
Ground to orbit, watching where contrails form.
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Shared data
Open to every forecaster, not held inside one trial.
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Methods
Agreed ways to turn both into credible evidence.
Get involved
A seed phase, then the first fund.
A seed phase funds the first research, convenes the people who will decide what gets measured, and assembles the Contrail Observatory Fund behind it: a larger time bound philanthropic vehicle backing the sensors, data, and methods avoidance needs to scale.
The first regulatory incentives for avoiding contrails are taking shape now, and they will need proof that a contrail was avoided. Without it, a fast and affordable climate win risks never earning enough trust to fly at scale.
Your support at this stage can make the difference in whether contrail avoidance reaches its potential.