Briefing

An operational roadmap for contrail mitigation in Europe

September 14, 2026

Current knowledge and remaining challenges to scale up contrail navigational avoidance, and how to start deploying it in Europe in the 2030s.

This briefing presents a roadmap to deploy contrail avoidance at scale in Europe in the 2030s. It reviews the operational reality of contrail navigational avoidance, and how to deploy it at scale in European airspace:

- Analysis of experience from flight trials

Remaining operational gaps in terms of tools, procedures, training
and collaboration

A roadmap to address those gaps and deploy contrail avoidance
in Europe by 2032.

The briefing is based on a To70 study in collaboration with T&E,
based on interviews with experts and research.

  • The problem - Contrails warm the planet as much as aviation's CO2 emissions.

  • The solution - Contrail navigational avoidance - deviating flights to avoid contrail formation areas - is the most efficient mitigations lever avialable today

  • The challenge - To achieve significant benefits, contrail avoidance must be deployed at large scale, and coordinated across entire regions.

Read the full briefing here.