Microsoft Azure fuels a new solution to make flying greener for Satavia

“What we’re showing you can do here is – across all operators – be able to avoid contrail formation and that we can really reduce a huge amount of climate impact from the aviation industry,” emphasises Elliott Bussell, Head of Data Science at Satavia. Contrails heighten the effect of global warming, accounting for almost two-thirds of the entire climate impact of aviation. Now, Satavia, a UK start-up based in Cambridge, hopes to eliminate 60% of aviation’s climate impact through its innovative AI-powered tech solution.

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Fuelled by Microsoft Azure

“The core of our technology is called 5DX. It’s a software platform and it’s cloud-based so it’s built in Microsoft Azure,” explains Satavia CEO and Founder, Adam Durant.

The platform draws on the team’s deep knowledge of atmosphere and climate science and aerospace engineering to run high-resolution weather prediction models that can be used to make predictions about where aircraft contrails will form. This information can then be used to adjust flight paths, so that the formation of contrails is avoided and the flight’s climate impact is minimised.

Adam Durant continues, “Our involvement with Microsoft is really important on this journey. They provide the technology infrastructure we need to be able to provide a secure and scalable solution.”

AI-powered data analysis

“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,” says Adam Durant. “In every cell we’re doing about 100 algorithmic computations.”

Incredible bursts of compute power are required to run such high-resolution computational models and, together with Microsoft Azure’s AI tools, this was a key reason the business chose to build its compute infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.

“The Microsoft platform and Azure specifically is flexible in the way we are able to spin up our resources quickly,” confirms Satavia software engineer, Yan Bin Pan.

64 tonnes of CO2 saved on a single flight

On October 23, 2021, the international airline Etihad Airways applied the technology to one of its commercial flights.

“We discovered that the aircraft was going to make contrails,” reports Adam Durant, “we changed flight levels so that we actually flew over the top of the region of airspace that would have created those contrails. When we analysed the trajectory after the flight had taken place, we determined that we had saved close to 64 tonnes of CO2.”

“I see this as the way aviation must go,” states technical pilot Mimmo Catalano, who flew the aircraft. “The view outside the windows was the same as for any other flight but, that day, everything looked greener than usual.”