Mission Profile and Wing Planform Optimization for Cost-Effective Climate Impact Mitigation

Commercial aircraft design and operational strategies must increasingly adapt to reduce aviation’s climate impact. As contrails are the largest individual contributor to such impact and their formation is highly sensitive to atmospheric conditions, mission profile optimization emerges as an effective method to explore contrail mitigation approaches. In this work, the tradeoff between direct operating costs (DOC) and the 100-year global average temperature response ([Formula: see text]) is investigated through simultaneous optimization of the two-dimensional mission profile and the wing planform of a narrowbody aircraft, using optimal control theory in a multidisciplinary design optimization framework. The relative importance of DOC and [Formula: see text] is varied in the objective function to produce a Pareto front. Atmospheric parameters are representative of midlatitude humidity conditions. Air traffic management regulations are disregarded, and the aircraft maximum takeoff mass is fixed. A 4000 km mission profile is optimized for a fixed baseline wing planform. Results show that a 49% reduction in [Formula: see text] is obtained with only a 0.4% increase in DOC, mostly by locally diverting flights around atmospheric zones with conditions favorable to contrail persistence. Simultaneously optimizing the wing planform with the mission profile improves the Pareto front overall and results in a 55% reduction in [Formula: see text] corresponding to a 0.3% increase in DOC. Comparable results are achieved for short-range flights of 2000 km. We conclude that contrail avoidance is a cost-effective method of minimizing the climate effects of aviation and that simultaneous optimization of the aircraft wing planform can further reduce the climate impact at a lower DOC penalty.