This review examines the critical role of meteorological data in optimising flight trajectories and enhancing operational efficiency in aviation. Weather conditions directly influence fuel consumption, delays and safety, making their integration into flight planning increasingly vital. Understanding these dynamics becomes essential for risk mitigation as climate change drives more frequent and severe weather events. Synthesising insights from 57 studies published between 2001 and 2024, this article highlights key variables – such as wind, temperature and convective weather – significantly impacting flight operations. A framework is proposed to improve air traffic management’s safety, efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The findings emphasise the need for systematically incorporating meteorological inputs into trajectory optimisation models, such as wind shear, convective storms and temperature gradients. This integration improves operational predictability and safety while advancing sustainability goals by reducing fuel consumption and CO2 emissions – an increasingly important priority amid rising climate variability and global air traffic demand.

The icing wind tunnel can simulate the air flow at a high altitude; such an air flow contains supercooled droplets moving at certain velocities. An integrated experiment method was proposed, and it included the icing test and shear stress measurements in the simulated environment of the icing wind tunnel. The error caused by the change in experimental environments was completely eliminated with this novel method. Thus, there was no discrepancy between the real-time and experimental values of shear stress between the ice and substrate. The experiments of icing and shear stress measurements are carried out by varying the following parameters: icing temperature, mean volume diameter (MVD) of droplets, and surface roughness of the substrate. The results indicate that the shear stress between the ice and the substrate increases with the decrease in temperature provided the temperature is relatively high. When the MVD value is 22 μm, the liquid water content is about 1 g/m3 and surface roughness is 2 μm. Under these conditions, the shear stress reaches its maximum value at a temperature of –15°C. The shear stress is also affected by the MVD values of droplets, and the surface roughness of substrate.