Night flights leave trail of global-warming damage

Restrictions on night-time aircraft flights could help in the fight against global warming and also make life easier for people living near airports.

A study has shown that the condensation trails, or contrails, left by the exhaust of aircraft engines have more effect during the night than during the day.

The impact of contrails - clouds of tiny ice particles that can reflect light and heat - was also greater in the winter months when nights are longer.

The scientists behind the study, which was published in Nature, said the results suggested that re-scheduling flights for the daytime could help to minimise the impact of aviation on climate change.

Reading University scientists used computer models of contrail data to show that even though only one in four flights over Britain occurred at night, these night-time flights are responsible for about 60 per cent of climate warming associated with the condensation trails.

"We conducted our study for a site in southeast England, located at the entrance region to the North Atlantic flight corridor," said Nicola Stuber, a researcher in Reading's Meteorology Department.

"We concentrated on persistent contrails, those which remain for an hour or so after the aircraft have gone," she said.

The findings have wider implications because they could be used by politicians to justify modifying aircraft to reduce the environmental impact of growing airline traffic.

"The fact that the volume of air traffic is set to rapidly grow in coming years makes it important to investigate the effects of contrails on our climate," said Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, the project's leader.

- INDEPENDENT