In Octomber 2025 at the EASN Conference in Madris, I presented our research on the effect of contrails on the global warming. We started this research as sceptics in 2021. Ultimately, the contrails are water crystals (ice), and they reflect the sun rays back into space, like the clouds. When the sky is clear, and crossed by condensation trails, more solar radiations are reflected back into space by them. However, after studying the global warming data in the pandemic years in contrast with the normal years, we concluded that, in spite of our expectations, the aviation sadly contributes to the global warming by contrails.

Recently, our paper has been accepted by the prestigious MDPI Aerospace journal and published as open access:

Global Impact of Aviation Contrails – MDPI Aerospace

This < video > helps at understanding of the paper: it is an animation compressing 25 years of the Earth’s radiative balance as measured by the NASA Ceres satellites. The difference made by the 2 years of pandemics when the aviation was approximately reduced to half is not obvious in the video, but it is detected in the paper. (Note: TOA means top of the atmosphere).

The article puts forward solutions. Here we differentiate from the majority of the researchers on the subject, who are climate experts and physicists. Our solutions are more practical and adapted to the reality of aviation, taking advantage of our main expertise, which is the aerospace domain.

Photo credits: Jan Jasinski, airliners.net