Space weather events, including solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms, have significant effects on various transportation systems. This review provides a comprehensive examination of the current understanding and future outlook of space weather effects on air, maritime, railway, and ground transportation. It explores the mechanisms through which space weather causes communication blackouts, satellite navigation failure, elevated cosmic radiation, and geomagnetically induced currents, leading to disruptions in transportation operations. Historical events are analyzed to underscore the diversity and severity of these impacts. Additionally, this review discusses the anticipated challenges posed by the upcoming solar maximum of Solar Cycle 25 and highlights the need for improved forecasting, mitigation strategies, and resilient infrastructure to safeguard transportation systems against space weather threats. By integrating findings from recent studies and historical data, this review aims to enhance the preparedness and response strategies of the transportation sector in the face of evolving space weather risks.

Accurate sector-based air traffic flow predictions are essential for ensuring the safety and efficiency of the air traffic management (ATM) system. However, due to the inherent spatial and temporal dependencies of air traffic flow, it is still a challenging problem. To solve this problem, some methods are proposed considering the relationship between sectors, while the complicated spatiotemporal dynamics and interdependencies between traffic flow of route segments related to the sector are not taken into account. To address this challenge, the attention-enhanced graph convolutional long short-term memory network (AGC-LSTM) model is applied to improve the short-term sector-based traffic flow prediction, in which spatial structures of route segments related to the sector are considered for the first time. Specifically, the graph convolutional networks (GCN)-LSTM network model was employed to capture spatiotemporal dependencies of the flight data, and the attention mechanism is designed to concentrate on the informative features from key nodes at each layer of the AGC-LSTM model. The proposed model is evaluated through a case study of the typical enroute sector in the central–southern region of China. The prediction results show that MAE reduces by 14.4% compared to the best performing GCN-LSTM model among the other five models. Furthermore, the study involves comparative analyses to assess the influence of route segment range, input and output sequence lengths, and time granularities on prediction performance. This study helps air traffic managers predict flight situations more accurately and avoid implementing overly conservative or excessively aggressive flow management measures for the sectors.

As demand for flights increases, the global aviation industry must transform to become more sustainable. Here we propose six pathways to set aviation on a path to a greener future that include innovations in aviation fuel, management, and regulations.

The rapid growth of air travel and aviation emissions in recent years has contributed to an increase in climate impact. Contrails have been considered one of the main factors of the aviation-induced climate impact. This paper deals with the formation of persistent contrails and its relationship with fuel consumption and flight time when flight altitude and true airspeed vary. Detailed contrail formation conditions pertaining to altitude, relative humidity and temperature are formulated according to the Schmidt–Appleman criterion. Building on the contrail formation model, the proposed model would minimise total travel time, fuel consumption and contrail length associated with a given flight. Empirical data (including pressure, temperature, relative humidity, etc.) collected from seven flight information regions in Chinese observation stations were used to analyse the spatial and temporal distributions of the persistent contrail formation area. The trade-off between flight time, fuel consumption and contrail length are illustrated with a real-world case. The results provided a valuable benchmark for flight route planning with environmental, flight time, sustainable flight trajectory planning and fuel consumption considerations, and showed significant contrail length reduction through an optimal selection of altitude and true airspeed.

Space weather can impede normal aviation operations through communication blackouts, GNSS‐based navigation and surveillance failures, and elevated cosmic radiation, consequently resulting in necessary flight plan adjustments and considerable economic costs. Although space weather effects have been heavily emphasized, the literature on the economic effects on aviation is limited. In this study, we estimate the economic impacts from the perspective of air traffic management, assuming an extremely strong space weather event like the 2003 Halloween solar storm would occur in 2019 with a booming air transport industry in recent years. We find that (a) as the high‐frequency communication blackouts may lead to polar flight rerouting and cancellations, possible daily economic costs could range from €0.21 million to €2.20 million per day; (b) during the satellite navigation failure period in the continental United States, as aircraft utilizes ground navigation aids as a backup, the increased flying time and disrupted descent approach operations may lead to additional cost of €2.43 million; (c) a surveillance failure can reduce airspace capacity and increase the workload of air traffic controllers, resulting in fatigue and perhaps risking flight safety; (d) to prevent massive cosmic radiation exposure, the economic costs of flight cancellations can be from €2.77 million to €48.97 million, depending on the cosmic radiation dose limits for a given plan. Our study indicates that severe space weather events may briefly disrupt normal aviation operations and cause substantial economic losses if future aviation equipment and technology are fragile to its effects.