If you've never heard of contrails I'm pretty sure you've seen them one point in your life. It's that white cloud like trail you see behind an airplane flying above. These cloud like trails might look cool, but they're actually harmful to the environment.
What are contrails?
Contrails which is short for condensation trails, starts to form 25,000ft above the ground. It's made out of water, soot, and cool air. When water vapor is ejected from the back of an airplane engine it condenses and freezes over soot particles in the air creating ice crystals.
This only happens when the air is particularly cool and at 25,000ft is the altitude contrails start to form. They basically act as artificial clouds creating a thermal blanket trapping in heat. This is called Cirrus Radiative forcing.
Contrails are double edged swords as contrails does reflect light and heat from space thats coming to earth. So during the daytime contrails have a net neutral effect on warming. The problem comes at night. Contrails add to the warming of our planet by trapping the heat inside our atmosphere which come from the surface of the earth. There is a more complicated explanation to this involving electrons, the type of gases in the atmosphere, and how they move but I'm not gonna go into that and bore you.
Before the pandemic, red eye flights were really popular as they're cheap and you more or less get a good sleep schedule out of it. Unlike daytime contrails, that create both a cooling and a warming effect. The contrails created at night only creates a warming effect.
You might think "oh there isn't that much contrails for there to be any actual damage or effect." WRONG! 30,000 to 40,000 square miles of contrails are created everyday in high traffic areas (before the pandemic) which changes the planet's temperature by 2-3 degrees.
Solution
So why don't planes just fly below the altitude when contrails start to form? They can't because lower altitudes means an increase in air resistance on the planes meaning the plane would have to burn more fuel being less efficient. The effects of contrails easily vanish along with the contrails themselves unlike majority of Carbon Dioxide emissions which take years. So it's actually worse to just fly lower altitudes.
Contrails directly expedite the effects of climate change. Alternative fuels such as bio fuels and hydrogen fuels can decrease carbon emission and contrail formation. Unfortunately as of now it is too expensive to make that switch and very difficult to make that feasible for the airlines. Airbus did recently announce zero emission concept aircrafts here. Although production isn't anytime soon, the idea is in the right direction.
We as passengers can actually help limit contrails. By choosing to fly during the day instead of the night. It's that simple. The airline industry is extremely consumer driven and if they notice those red eye flights are flying close to empty then the airlines would have no choice but to cut back scheduling on those red eye flights.
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