Winners of The Sustainable Flight Challenge praised for helping to reshape the future of aviation

More than 2,000 airline employees from 22 airlines took part in TSFC 2023, including SkyTeam members as well as ‘friends and family’ airlines. They operated a total of 72 flights – 50 more than in 2022.

Together, they helped achieve an average improvement of 19% in CO2 intensity compared to the same flights operated the previous month and eliminated a whopping 30 tons of CO2 emissions during the two-week competition.

Winners of the 25 subcategory awards were unveiled last month. And after further deliberation by the judges, the seven main award winners were announced yesterday at an event at the Delta Flight Museum in Atlanta.

Patrick Roux, SkyTeam CEO, said: “Alliances were built on cooperation and SkyTeam’s Sustainable Flight Challenge demonstrates how working together beyond the traditional realms of network and customer service can reduce aviation’s impact.”

“The participating airlines have sparked hundreds of new solutions and ways of working that have the potential to bring about positive action and drive wider industry change while we await game-changing technology and greater availability of sustainable aviation fuels.”

 

The winners are:

Kenya Airways played a leading role in pioneering the use of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) in Africa by developing new supply chains using local feedstocks and production plants and engaging with stakeholders to operate the first international flight using SAF in Africa. Through its TSFC endeavors, Kenya Airways has helped pave the way for wider SAF availability and use in Africa, becoming a leader in African sustainable aviation.

 

 

KLM impressed the judges by being the airline with the most solutions adopted by other airlines. Sharing knowledge and expertise is fundamental to The Challenge, and the airline showed a proactive commitment to uploading its solutions onto the shared TSFC platform for other airlines to implement as part of their own sustainability efforts.

 

 

Air France’s OLGA (Holistic Green Airport) project wowed the judges due to the breadth of the partnerships established across nine workstreams. These comprised 41 partners and 17 third parties including airports, airlines, aeronautics experts, public authorities, researchers and start-ups across Europe. The OLGA project aims to improve aviation’s environmental impact by drawing on complementary resources and skills of each stakeholder, knowledge and best practice exchange, and by facilitating the large-scale implementation of environmental solutions.

 

 

A high payload fraction through passenger load factor and belly cargo on both legs of the airline’s Bucharest to Madrid routing gave TAROM the advantage through a more efficient operation.

 

 

China Eastern increased its payload fraction on the short and medium-haul flights it operated as part of The Challenge, greatly reducing emissions for its TSFC flights compared to its baseline for the same flights operated the previous month.

 

 

In a category that has great potential to make flying more sustainable by reducing catering and cleaning waste, KLM Cityhopper went above and beyond. The airline reduced waste on both its flights to such an extent that only 12kg was generated for the 192 passengers on board – a mere 62 grams per person. The IATA industry average is 1.43kg of waste per passenger.

 

 

Air Europa demonstrated how it is possible to make ground operations more sustainable. Nearly half of the airline’s ground support equipment used for The Challenge was electric, including their pushback, enabling the airline to generate the lowest CO2 emissions per passenger on its Madrid-Amsterdam round-trip flights.