Climate Optimized Flight Routes – The Path from Research to Operations

Studies in research often promise a fast system implementation and usage in operation. But especially in safety critical areas like air navigation services it can be recognized that it takes quite a long time from proclaimed "ready for use" at research level until actual operational use. Why this difference? Often, necessary aspects like safety assessment, certification, and training procedures for operators cannot be analyzed by researcher. The validation under operational circumstances may lead to additional questions. The presentation demonstrates several challenges in the actual discussion about avoidance of persistent contrails. The German project D-KULT (Demonstrator klima- und umwelt- freundlicher Lufttransport, June 2022 to May 2025) works on several solutions and its ideas are presented during the lecture.