(gentle music)
- Climate change is the number-one issue
that the world is thinking about today.
Aviation's responsible for
about three and a half percent
of human climate change.
We get about two-thirds
coming from contrails,
the clouds that aircraft make.
They interact with heat
that's coming from the Earth's surface
that's trying to escape to space,
and they absorb and
redirect some of that heat
back down towards the surface.
SATAVIA work with eco-conscious
aircraft operators
who want to reduce their climate impact.
The core of our technology is called 5-DX.
It's a software platform.
It's cloud based, so we've built in Azure.
- We're running lots of high-resolution
numerical weather prediction models,
which produces a lot of
information around the atmosphere,
which we can then build on top of
to make predictions about where
aircraft can form contrails.
- We're running our model
at 30-second time steps,
and we break down the Earth's atmosphere
into a grid of six billion cells.
- The Microsoft platform and
Azure in specific is flexible
in the way that we are able
to spin up our resources quickly.
We are able to store large
amounts of data in cloud
and literally on any of our API systems.
- On the 23rd of October, 2021,
Etihad ran a customer revenue flight
where they did a whole
load of interventions
to try and reduce the climate impact.
We discovered that the aircraft
was going to make contrails.
We ended up flying a little bit higher
and change flight levels
so that we actually flew
over the top of a region of airspace
that would have created those contrails.
And when we analyzed the trajectory
after the flight had taken place,
we determined that we'd saved
close to 64 tons of CO2.
- The flight was a success,
and thanks to our partner SATAVIA,
we were able to avoid
a high-probability area
of contrails over Romania.
What I see for the future
is that flights like this
becomes business as usual.
And I see all our industry
moving towards this goal.
- Our involvement with Microsoft
is really important on this journey.
They provide the technology
infrastructure we need
to provide a secure and scalable solution.
And so I can see a number
of partnerships we can form
to really take this forward and scale it.
- We knew we were taking special care
of the environment that day.
And although the view was like
any other flight that day,
everything looked cleaner down there.
(music ends)