An airplane in flight, emerging from a cloud.

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Marriot - Shutterstock - Sipa

  • The drop in air traffic due to Covid-19 and climate concerns have propelled the problem of pollution generated by airplanes to the forefront of the news.

  • The debate continues even within the ranks of ISAE-Supaero, the prestigious Toulouse engineering school, where a doctoral student has developed an online simulator of the climate trajectory of aviation.

  • Technological leaps and bounds, changes in traffic, the CAST application, in self-service, methodically grinds all the parameters.

  • It "spits out" a multitude of possible scenarios.

    Enthusiasts can have fun imagining the future.

    Professionals can trace it using a scientific tool.

Between the Covid-19 crisis which has nailed the fleets to the ground, the little music of the "flygskam" movement - the shame of taking the plane - and the general concern caused by global warming, this is one of the questions of the moment: What direction should the aeronautics industry take in the decades to come to avoid worsening the climate?

Think tanks like The Shift Project are working on the problem.

Some advocate embarking on the path of tourist sobriety while others, with Airbus in the lead, are banking on technological revolutions such as hydrogen propulsion.

Proof that the European aircraft manufacturer is attentive to the subject, it published last week for the sake of transparency the carbon footprint of its planes: The 566 planes it delivered in 2020, a year heavily impacted by the health crisis, will emit 440 million tonnes of CO2 during their 22 years of life, the equivalent of France's total emissions in 2019.

Push the sliders to play the sarbiter

The debate even won over ISAE-Supaero in Toulouse, the famous engineering school where future aeronautical engineers are trained.

Thanks to one of her doctoral students, Thomas Planès, she has just put CAST *, an interactive application that allows to assess the climate impact of aviation.

"We are not taking sides," explains the researcher.

Our scientific approach consists in simulating climatic trajectories for aviation and in knowing if they will be sustainable ”.

With the enormous advantage for specialists, students or simple enthusiasts of being able to pilot the scenarios themselves by pushing (or reducing) the cursors of the famous simulator.

By means of, it must be admitted, a great effort of concentration to tame CAST and the essential viewing of a tutorial.

In 2019, aviation was responsible for 2.6% of global CO2 emissions.

By relying on the Paris Climate Agreements, and therefore on the objective of limited warming to 2 ° C in 2050, the simulator sets the 2.6% bar as the “carbon budget” limit for the impact of aviation.

Several scenarios have already been entered, the one drawn by the world grouping of industrialists (Atag) for example, not sustainable as it is since the graph does not turn green.

White plumes with warming power

Then, in manual mode, depending on your convictions, your faith in technological progress, you can tweak the parameters: introduce the Covid-19 effect on the growth of traffic, imagine that we will take less by plane at home. future, that we will fill them more, bet on the massive arrival of new fuels, etc., etc., and mix everything finely to paint the sky pink of virtuous aeronautics.

"We even plan to introduce later the parameter of white traces of condensation emitted by planes which have a great heating power", underlines Thomas Planès.

The simulator equation will get even more complicated.

Almost fun for the average pilot.

Except that it is not a game but a compass for the future of an entire industrial sector.

* For Climate and Aviation - Sustainable trajectories

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  • Toulouse

  • Global warming

  • Airbus

  • Aeronautics

  • Planet