CICONIA is a SESAR industrial project aimed at developing solutions to mitigate the climate impact of aviation. Read our interview with project coordinator Philippe Masson from Airbus.

What is the rationale of the CICONIA project and what are its main objectives?

CICONIA supports the European Union's ambition of reaching climate neutrality by 2050, focusing on the challenge of aviation climate impact as non-CO2 emissions contribute about 2/3 of the net Effective Radiative Forcing (ERF) (Lee et al, 2021).

Non-CO2 impacts, and in particular the effects of persistent contrails, could be reduced through operational mitigation measures like trajectory optimisation. However, the demonstration that these operational mitigation measures are feasible at scale is still in the research phase and collecting valuable information to form a complete picture of what the operational mitigation measures can encompass .

CICONIA's goal within SESAR3 is to bring together all key stakeholders to support the development of environmentally effective, economically balanced, and operationally viable (safe) mitigation measures.

What are the top three challenges in addressing Non-CO2 effects of aviation/mitigating these effects?

• Development of reliable weather forecast products

• Modelling of climate impact at the scale of the A/C trajectory and taking into account uncertainties

• Operational mitigation measures feasible at scale without compromising safetyHow has this project built on the work of previous SESAR innovation projects?

How has this project built on the work of previous SESAR innovation projects?

The previous research projects have provided a methodology to define climate optimised aircraft trajectories (ConSA, ATM4E, FlyATM4E, CREATE). CICONIA will gather the expertise developed in these projects and will bring the operational expertise (Airline operation, ATM and ATC, OEM knowledge) to define an efficient climate mitigation operational concept.

What are the expected outcomes and benefits of this project?

Project outcomes are expected to be the following : 

• First version of weather forecasting to support contrail mitigation measures accompanied by a  recommendation and perspective for their improvement (eg. specification for new humidity sensing, perspective in space remote sensing…),

• Standardised industry wide climate impact models: bringing together experts across the industry, regulators and academia, these climate impact models will be validated in CICONIA and could function as the future reference used by EU ETS or CORSIA  to evaluate the climate impact of individual flights and the effectiveness of incentive or regulatory measures, and

• Flight planning, ATFM and ATM operational recommendations : CICONIA CONOPS (concept of operations) will enable an operational consensus on the correct and most impactful  operational mitigations, considering the trade-offs between environmental benefits, economic impacts, and operational impacts.

More about the project