Vol. 3 No. 2 (2025): EUROCONTROL PRC 2024 Data Challenge

This special issue presents research outcomes from the EUROCONTROL Performance Review Commission (PRC) 2024 Data Challenge, which tasked data scientists with developing open machine learning models to predict Actual TakeOff Weight (ATOW) of flights across Europe. ATOW is a critical parameter for estimating fuel consumption and aviation emissions, making accurate prediction essential for environmental impact
assessment in the aviation sector.

The challenge provided participants with 369,013 European flights from 2022, comprising approximately 158GB of parquet files. The data included flight origins, destinations, aircraft types, timing information, and high-resolution trajectory data at up to 1-second granularity. Of these flights, 105,959 were used for intermediate ranking submissions, while 52,190 were reserved for final evaluation.