Latest news on EUROCONTROL’s work on sustainability

In partnership with the German Aerospace Centre (DLR), EUROCONTROL Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC) carried out the world’s first live contrail prevention trial in 2021 and now continues its investigations. The trial proved that contrail formation can be prevented by diverting aircraft and changing the altitude at which they fly, thus reducing their impact on climate change and global warming. However, it was discovered that predicting areas where contrails will form is difficult in practice, as is the verification of contrails via geo stationary satellite images. The plan is now to build on the results of trials held in 2021 by carrying out more concentrated trials using real-time simulations to set up working procedures and capacity measures.

Working with new partners from weather services, EU consortia, science and industry, the MUAC/DLR contrail prevention project team expects to be able to improve predictions of contrail-prone areas using cameras and satellite pictures.

EUROCONTROL has supported the European Commission’s recently released EU Tourism Dashboard with aviation emissions data. The aim of the tool is to help policy-makers to get better access to statistics and policy-relevant indicators for tourism, supporting destinations and public authorities in tracking their progress in the green and digital transition. The tourism ecosystem was one of the most heavily affected by the measures put in place to curtail the COVID-19 pandemic. Making the ecosystem more resilient through the twin transition has become a strong European policy priority.

EASA and EUROCONTROL - in close cooperation with a dozen sustainability experts from different air navigation service providers (ANSPs) - have release two environmental reports. One report looks at environmental performance measurements and identifies strategic and technical recommendations for future work aiming to help the ANSPs to identify areas where they can contribute to strategic decarbonisation goals. The second report is a step- by- step guide on what ANSPs can do to control their own environmental impact. It also equips readers with the knowledge and tools necessary to apply carbon foot printing into their own business processes.