E-CONTRAIL 2 Launches Advisory Board Spanning Contrail Science, Industry, and Policy

Last Friday, the E-CONTRAIL 2 project marked a major milestone with the inaugural meeting of its Advisory Board. A group of leading voices from across the aviation, research, industry, and policy landscape who will help steer the project's work on contrail mitigation and climate impact reduction.

Turning contrail science into practice takes models that predict how a contrail will behave, satellites and machine learning that observe and refine those predictions, controllers who could adjust a flight path when it's actually worth doing, airlines that weigh the fuel cost of that choice, and regulators who decide whether it becomes standard practice. It's a chain with more than one link at each end — and until now, the people who run each part of it have rarely been in the same room.

The Advisory Board

• Kevin McCloskey — Research Scientist at Google Research. Kevin contributes an industry and technology perspective, with strong ties to ongoing contrail trial activities in the United States.

  
  

• Dr. Alessio Bozzo — Remote Sensing Scientist at EUMETSAT. As a satellite operator, Dr. Bozzo provides critical links to satellite-derived data products, essential for monitoring and validating contrail formation and persistence.

• Marc Shapiro — Director at Contrails.org and a key developer behind PyContrails, one of the most widely used open-source tools in contrail modeling. Marc brings the voice of the broader research community to the Advisory Board.

  
  

• Ilona Sitova — Senior Aviation Sustainability Expert at the Maastricht Upper Area Control Centre (MUAC), EUROCONTROL. Ilona brings deep operational expertise from the Network Manager side, with direct experience in EUROCONTROL's operational leg of contrail trials.

  
  

• Alejandra Martín Frías — Head of Sustainability Research at FLIGHTKEYS. Representing the flight dispatch and airline industry perspective, Alejandra connects the project with airline operations and Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) frameworks.

  
  

• Johan Colsman — Director General of Civil Aviation at the German Federal Ministry of Transport (since 2018). Also, he is former President of the Provisional Council of EUROCONTROL, former Vice-Chair of the EASA Management Board, and former advisor to the European Parliament and Commission on transport policy, bringing a wealth of high-level European aviation governance experience.

The involvement of these experts in the ECONTRAIL 2 Advisory Board not only strengthens the scientific and operational rigor of the project, but also opens the door to new collaborations, data-sharing opportunities, and stronger links with ongoing trials and policy discussions across Europe and beyond.