[steanne]

> The proposed detours typically result in a 1% shift (and again, this is only for a small percentage of flights). That means increasing fuel use and flight time by around 1%. So if your flight is three hours long, it’s only adding an extra two minutes. For a 10-hour flight, six minutes. This seems socially acceptable to me; most people would barely notice.

[SoftTalker]

Airlines will certainly notice a 1% fuel cost increase however. But, they'll just add it to ticket prices.

[mulmen]

It’s not a 1% increase in fuel costs. It’s 1% of 3% (for 80% mitigation) to 17% (for total mitigation). That’s a 0.03% to 0.17% increase in fuel costs.

[andrewflnr]

They'll all need to do it at once though, or people will just pick the cheaper flight that doesn't go around the contrail-forming region, basically every time.

Of course it's a coordination problem. It probably needs to be a regulation before it will actually happen.

[PunchyHamster]

the question is whether the contrail produces the amount of warming equivalent to extra fuel used, of which I'm doubtful

[jvanderbot]

The entire initiative is based on the idea that it is more friendly to route around contrails. I work actively in this area on the routing side (flightscience.ai), and can assure you it's actually fairly cheap climate-wise to reroute a flight given enough warning. If you check out their map (follow TFA's links), you can see that contrails are formed in fairly localized areas.

Go to aviationweather.gov, and you can see huge boxes of alert areas that we already have to deal with. It's really just another day at the office.