What’s new and what’s next for Cascade

What are we releasing today?

We are excited to launch this new website as well as a new version of the Boeing Cascade Climate Impact Model—focused on helping you explore foundational topics in aviation sustainability.

As part of this effort, we created guided Insights to explain the strategies available to our industry, explore traffic growth forecasts, and highlight important performance measures like fuel efficiency and emissions intensity. In combination with the Insights, we also introduced an updated front-end design, including a new guided tour and onboarding experience based on feedback from our user interface experts and usability testing.

Click any of these tiles to explore an insight.

To be more comprehensive and transparent, we have made dataset updates that give near-complete coverage of commercial aviation traffic. Today’s release adds the ability to view historical data since 1960 which helps to put future projections into perspective. In line with our goal for Cascade to be aligned with industry standards, Cascade now calculates baseline fuel burn and emissions figures based on EUROCONTROL’s Small Emitters Tool (SET). ^[1]

What is next for Cascade?

We are developing Cascade using an agile philosophy adding new capabilities and features in incremental steps to ensure continuous improvement. A selection of features and capabilities that are currently in development are shown below. We are planning to deliver these features as part of several releases in 2024.

List of features and capabilities currently in development

To enable enhanced analysis capabilities, we are currently improving the fidelity of the models. These model updates will create the ability for you to explore different sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathways, energy carriers, and future aircraft technologies across various markets and timelines. In addition, we plan to include options for exploring out-of-sector solutions to address any remaining emissions. We also plan to create the option to filter global data to specific regions or countries for tailoring your analysis.

This year we are also planning to improve the user experience by making our new Insights more interactive. We also plan to make updates to our map to enhance how you visualize different futures. Lastly, whether you are a novice or advanced user, you will be able to create and then save your decarbonization scenarios.

Towards the end of 2024, a new dashboard and layout will integrate all these new features and capabilities.

Throughout the development of these new features, we plan to collect feedback to continuously improve Cascade as we look ahead to 2025 and beyond. For more information on how we are continuously improving, check out Cascade.