Persistent Contrail Avoidance Trajectories for a Supersonic Business Jet

There is growing concern about the climate impact of persistent warming condensation trails (or contrails) that form behind aircraft. Previous work has considered the effect of supersonic aircraft fleets on global contrail formation, but individual supersonic flight trajectories that avoid regions favorable to contrail formation have not yet been studied. This paper proposes an A*-based algorithm to find minimum-time, wind-optimal trajectories, with and without persistent contrail avoidance, for a Mach 1.6 supersonic business jet. Two aircraft variants are considered: a high-boom aircraft that flies at subsonic speeds overland, and a low-boom aircraft that flies supersonic everywhere. Flight paths are generated for the New York City-London and Dubai-Singapore city pairs for winter 2023-24 and summer 2023, respectively, and the time and fuel penalties due to contrail avoidance are quantified. For the high-boom aircraft, contrail avoidance leads to fuel burn reduction in a small number of cases due to increased time spent flying subsonic. However, the results show that on average, diverting around regions favorable to contrail formation is detrimental to both flight duration and fuel consumption.