Google, American Airlines And Bill Gates Hand In Hand Against Climate Change

JAKARTA - Google embraces American Airlines and Bill Gates' climate investment fund, Breakthrough Energy to reduce climate change resulting from aircraft tracks.

The third goal to avoid the creation of thin white lines or contrains, which are sometimes seen behind airplanes, turns out to have a huge impact on climate. Therefore, they will map out more sustainable flight routes.

In this case, they will bring together large amounts of data, such as satellite imagery, weather data and flight lines using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

Contrains form when an airplane flies through the moisture layer and can survive as a cirrus cloud for a few minutes or hours depending on atmospheric conditions.

Although these additional clouds can reflect sunlight back into space during the day, they also have a large amount of heat that will not leave the Earth's atmosphere.

As a result, it will create a net warm-up effect. Avoid flying through areas that create contrains can reduce heating.

However, the challenge is knowing which flight routes will make contrains. To avoid that, a group of pilots in America flew 70 test flights over a six month while using Google's AI-based predictions, cross-referenced with Breakthrough Energy's open source contraint model.

"After this test flight, we analyzed satellite imagery and found that the pilot was able to reduce contrains by up to 54 percent," Google said in a statement, quoted Thursday, August 10.

"This is the first proof that commercial aviation can evade contrains and thereby reduce its climate impact," he added.

Another significant finding from their tests was flights that tried to avoid making contrains burning 2 percent of the additional fuel.

Recent studies show that a small part of the flight needs to be adjusted to avoid most contrain heating.

"Therefore, the total fuel impact can be as low as 0.3 percent across airline flights. This shows that contrains can be avoided on scales of around 5-25 US dollars per tonne of CO2e (equivalent to carbon dioxide) using our existing predictions, making it a measure of cost-effective reduction of heating, and further improvements are expected," Google explained.

Furthermore, Google, American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy will develop and research further to automate avoidance, target contrains with the highest impacts, and improve satellite-based verification.