Quantifying the Fuel Consumption Penalties for an Operational Contrail Avoidance System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
<div class="htmlview paragraph">Recent work has shown that when an aircraft encounters ambient ice-supersaturated conditions (where contrails may form and persist), it may be possible to avoid contrail formation by shifting cruise altitude up or down 2000 feet. If an aircraft's cruise altitude is shifted from the optimal profile during a portion of the mission, fuel consumption increases. Because on average approximately 20% of distance flown by commercial airliners is through ice-supersaturated regions, this study quantifies the fuel burn penalties for the notional scenario of flying the same fraction of cruise at altitude displacements of +2000, -2000, and -4000 ft. Present aircraft performance data was used to generate accurate fuel burn penalty estimates.</div> <div class="htmlview paragraph">This study finds that the net penalties for existing aircraft to fly contrail avoidance shifts vary between 0.2% and 0.7% increase in block fuel consumption. The magnitude of the fuel penalty can be reduced by approximately 0.25% by slowing down during the shifted segment. Further reductions are attainable for future aircraft with application of engine and aerodynamic technology intended to improve off-design performance. This suggests that if contrail regions could be predicted prior to flight planning, the fuel burn penalties for avoiding contrails over a single mission may be relatively small. However, implementation of this type of contrail avoidance system requires considerable advancements in the prediction of ice-supersaturated regions. Moreover, the fuel burn penalties realized in practical application of this system are likely to be larger than the single flight results presented in this study because the altitude shifts and routing approved by air traffic control will not be ideal.</div>
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".