Environmental impact

Like all activities involving combustion, operating powered aircraft (from airliners to hot air balloons) releases greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), soot, and other pollutants into the atmosphere. In addition, there are environmental impacts specific to aviation:

• Aircraft operating at high altitudes near the tropopause (mainly large jet airliners) emit aerosols and leave contrails, both of which can increase cirrus cloud formation — cloud cover may have increased by up to 0.2% since the birth of aviation.
• Aircraft operating at high altitudes near the tropopause can also release chemicals that interact with greenhouse gases at those altitudes, particularly nitrogen compounds, which interact with ozone, increasing ozone concentrations.
• Most light piston aircraft burn avgas, which contains tetra-ethyl lead (TEL), a highly-toxic substance that can cause soil contamination at airports. Some lower-compression piston engines can operate on unleaded mogas, and turbine engines and diesel engines — neither of which requires lead — are appearing on some newer light aircraft.

Water vapor contrails left by high-altitude jet airliners. These may contribute to cirrus cloud formation.



Wikipedia: Aviation and the environment

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.