To investigate the influence of climate change on flight routes and journey times, we feed atmospheric wind fields generated from climate model simulations into a routing algorithm of the type used operationally by flight planners. We focus on transatlantic flights between London and New York, and how they change when the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration is doubled. We find that a strengthening of the prevailing jet-stream winds causes eastbound flights to significantly shorten and westbound flights to significantly lengthen in all seasons. For example, eastbound and westbound crossings in winter become approximately twice as likely to take under 5 hours 20 minutes and over 7 hours, respectively. Even assuming no future growth in aviation, the extrapolation of our results to all transatlantic traffic suggests that aircraft will collectively be airborne for an extra 2,000 hours each year, burning an extra 7.2 million gallons of jet fuel at a cost of US$ 22 million, and emitting an extra 70 million kg CO2.

To investigate the influence of climate change on turbulence, we diagnose a basket of 21 clear-air turbulence measures from simulations using two different climate models. We find that global turbulence strengthens significantly under climate change. For example, within the transatlantic flight corridor in winter, most turbulence measures show a 10–40% increase in the median strength of turbulence and a 40–170% increase in the frequency of occurrence of moderate-or-greater turbulence. For reference, turbulence currently injures hundreds of passengers each year worldwide, costing airlines hundreds of millions of dollars, and occasionally causing structural damage to planes.

The above findings provide further evidence of the two-way interaction between aviation and climate change, which is an emerging research area that deserves further study.