by Elsie Clark | Oct 27, 2025 | Innovation, Sustainability
Swedavia are the first in Europe to introduce a curved air traffic approaches concept at Stockholm Arlanda Airport.
The Established on RNP (EoR) concept makes it easier for aircraft to approach on a curve, thereby increasing capacity, sustainability, and efficiency. More aircraft can land per hour as the runway queue is reduced, while fewer aircraft on the arrival runway helps limit unnecessary fuel burn.
Susanne Norman, Director of Operations at Swedavia, said:
For us, it is of course gratifying that Swedavia will be the first in Europe to apply the new concept for managing arrivals. Enabling more curved approaches is also the most effective way to support airlines in their transition work, in addition to facilitating increased use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
Launched in partnership with Luftfartsverket, the initiative encourages airlines to invest in tech compatible with curved approaches, which also minimises noise.
Anna Granberg, Director of Operations at Luftfartsverket, commented:
The modernisation of the airspace by Luftfartsverket shows how air traffic control can help reduce the environmental impact of aviation. The traffic flow into Stockholm Arlanda Airport becomes more efficient during peak hours, and arriving aircraft have shorter flight paths with reduced emissions.
To adopt the EoR concept, airports and aircraft need to have bespoke equipment, specially-trained staff, and a permit from the local aerospace authority. Nevertheless, airlines including SAS and Norwegian have celebrated the development. Alexandra Lindgren Kaoukji, Head of External Communication and PR at SAS, said:
SAS welcomes all initiatives that help reduce fuel consumption, noise, and emissions. The introduction of the new approach concept is a step in the right direction towards a more efficient and more sustainable airspace around Arlanda.
Join us at Aerospace Tech Week 2026 to discuss the future of efficient, sustainable air traffic operations.
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by Elsie Clark | Oct 22, 2025 | Flight Ops IT, Innovation, Sustainability
According to the latest patent data, innovation in AI for sustainable aviation and aerospace tech has increased by 20% over the past five years.
The Inside Green Innovation: Progress Report from Appleyard Lees found that global patent filings in the sector went up from 254 in 2019 to 307 in 2023. Increasing control of variables such as aircraft altitude, speed, and pressure, as well as advances in onboard systems and digital data processing, are attributed to the growth.
Adam Tindall, UK and European Patent Attorney for Appleyard Lees, said:
Innovations in areas such as aircraft design, propulsion, operational efficiencies and reductions in waste and energy infrastructure – traditionally aimed at achieving business advantage – are now expected also to reduce carbon emissions and meet environmental targets.
As part of this, AI-driven innovation is showing a tangible surge in aviation and aerospace and redefining how organisations are addressing the industries’ challenges.
The report found that Boeing remains the leader in sustainable aerospace development, filing the most patents over the past ten years. Other leaders include Honeywell, GE Aerospace, Airbus, Thales, and the Chinese company SZ DJI Technology. French company Safran was also highlighted as a key developer in fuel efficiency and hybrid propulsion.
The use cases for AI in sustainable aviation development are only increasing. From flight ops to SAF production, the potential for optimisation is extensive. However, the aviation industry must remember that strong data foundations are required for AI insights to be useful and actionable. And while the patent activity is promising, as net-zero emissions targets loom nearer, successful implementation will be just as important as innovation.
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by Elsie Clark | Oct 16, 2025 | Innovation, Sustainability
Wagner Sustainable Fuels has launched its new operations facility in Toowoomba, Australia.
Developed in partnership with Boeing and FlyORO, the dedicated terminal will blend sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). As Australia’s first Roundtable of Sustainable Biomaterials (RSB)-certified company, Wagner Sustainable Fuels customers are guaranteed chain of custody and SAF authenticity.
Matt Doyle, CEO of Wagner Sustainable Fuels, commented:
This is a defining moment for sustainable aviation in Australia and underscores Wagner Sustainable Fuels’ commitment to provide solutions today for the challenges of tomorrow.
The launch of our Toowoomba Terminal is the start of our plans to deliver decarbonisation benefits and meet the aviation sector’s growing demand through flexible, efficient and scalable SAF blending. With the support from Boeing, we’re focused on bringing large scale SAF and renewable diesel production to Australia and integrating it into the global supply chain through the Brisbane Recycling and SAF Facility, which is currently under planning and development.
SAF blending is a critical to aviation’s sustainable development journey. During the process, ‘pure’ SAF is mixed with standard fossil jet fuel to create a fuel that is compatible with existing infrastructure.
Dr. Kimberly Camrass, Boeing’s Head of Asia Pacific Sustainability, added:
Current global regulations permit commercial aircraft to use up to a 50/50 blend of SAF and fossil jet fuel. This will continue to rise as additional production pathways are certified,
Wagner’s commercial blending terminal is a powerful step forward in aviation decarbonisation, boosting regional employment and opening new export markets. It will also provide important learnings to support the development of robust and scalable SAF supply chains within Australia.
According to the Boeing CSIRO SAF Roadmap, demand for jet fuel in Australia is set to grow by 75% by 2050. The Wagner facility’s partnership with FlyORO will help consolidate SAF’s position as a viable alternative fuel and create more opportunities for sustainable development across APAC.
Jonathan Yeo, FlyORO’s CEO, said:
FlyORO’s modular SAF blending system, AlphaLite, doesn’t just help reduce emissions – it creates a scalable platform for collaboration, co-investment, and transparency across the fuel value chain.
his integrated model complements FlyORO’s broader deployment strategy, including standalone facilities such as the one operating in Singapore. This is how we unlock speed and scale. We’re excited to partner with the leadership of Wagner Sustainable Fuels and Boeing to pioneer a more sustainable flying ecosystem in Australia.
Join us at Aerospace Tech Week 2026 to discuss the scalability of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
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by ATR Contributor | Sep 30, 2025 | Innovation, Sustainability
In airline operations, tail assignment is often underestimated. At first glance, it seems like a straightforward exercise: matching available aircraft to scheduled flights. But behind this decision lies a highly complex optimisation challenge that impacts costs, reliability, environmental performance, and the passenger experience.
When managed intelligently, tail assignment becomes a strategic lever for operational efficiency and resilience. By assigning the right aircraft to the right flight at the right time, airlines can reduce disruptions, minimise costs, increase the OTP and improve overall performance—all while advancing sustainability objectives.
What is tail assignment and why it matters
Tail assignment is the process of allocating specific aircraft (“tails”) to flights in a schedule. While it may appear as a final step in planning, its consequences are significant. An optimal tail assignment integrates variables such as:
- Maintenance schedules and requirements
- Aircraft fuel efficiency and performance
- Turnaround times and crew pairings
- Passenger bookings and seat configurations
- Operational restrictions (hard and soft)
- Stands and apron distribution at first wave
Misaligned assignments often lead to last-minute swaps, empty ferry flights, crew disruptions, and passenger overbooking issues. The ripple effect is costly—propagating delays across the network and eroding operational performance.
By contrast, a robust tail assignment plan enhances first-wave reliability, minimises irregular operations, and improves fleet utilisation.
The sustainability dimension: Reducing fuel and emissions
In an industry under pressure to decarbonise, tail assignment offers an immediate and practical lever for sustainability. Even within the same fleet, aircraft vary in fuel efficiency. Optimal planning allows airlines to:
– Assign the most efficient aircraft to longer or fuel-intensive routes
– Reduce unnecessary aircraft swaps and avoid suboptimal usage
– Minimise empty repositioning flights
– Contain delay propagation, lowering the fuel penalties of irregular operations
The result is measurable impact: up to 0.5% savings in fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions—an improvement that can translate into millions in annual cost reductions, while also supporting corporate climate commitments.
Smarter overbooking management
Overbooking is a common practice to maximise seat utilization, yet poor alignment with actual aircraft capacity creates denied boardings, compensation costs, and reputational damage. Tail assignment plays a decisive role here.
By matching flights with the aircraft that have the most suitable seat configuration based on expected demand, airlines can reduce overbooking incidents significantly. Small differences—just a few seats between aircraft types—can be the difference between smooth boarding and costly disruptions.
With smarter tail planning, airlines can achieve up to 20% fewer denied boardings, lowering compensation costs while improving passenger satisfaction.
Managing hard and soft constraints
Every schedule must balance two categories of restrictions:
- Hard constraints: non-negotiable rules such as certain maintenance checks, MTOW limits, crew duty limits, or regulatory requirements.
- Soft constraints: preferences or operational efficiencies, such as lack of equipment at certain airports, maintaining crew continuity, or stand allocation preferences.
Optimising tail assignment requires simultaneously respecting all hard constraints while intelligently balancing soft ones. When handled poorly, violations lead to costly chain reactions: aircraft and crew swaps, fuel inefficiencies, propagated delays, and passenger disruptions.
Sophisticated optimisation ensures robust plans that are not only efficient on paper but resilient in practice. Airlines adopting this approach have reported 40% fewer soft constraint violations and 10% fewer crew swaps, strengthening both operational stability and employee satisfaction.
Improving On-Time Performance (OTP)
On-Time Performance (OTP) is a cornerstone of airline reliability, shaping how passengers perceive punctuality and how efficiently operations run throughout the day. Tail assignment has a direct influence on whether flights depart as planned—or whether delays ripple across the network.
One source of disruption arises during the first wave of departures. If two aircraft are parked in adjacent stands with near-simultaneous departure times, their maneuvers can interfere with each other, creating avoidable delays that then propagate across the network. Integrating stand allocation into tail assignment decisions helps minimise these conflicts and strengthens first-wave reliability.
Another common cause of delay propagation comes from tight connections between flights and maintenance activities. When schedules leave insufficient buffer time between a flight’s arrival and the next departure or maintenance task, even a small disruption can snowball into significant knock-on delays. By embedding robustness into tail planning—allowing adequate margins where they matter most—airlines can reduce the likelihood of delay cascades.
Taken together, these optimisations provide a practical pathway to improving OTP, reducing compensation costs, and delivering a more reliable passenger experience.
Quantifiable value
Smarter tail assignment translates directly into measurable business impact through savings. Studies performed by customers and by Cisneria for other airlines demonstrate the following numbers:
- –0.5% Fuel & Emissions
- –20% Passenger Overbookings
- –40% Soft Constraint Violations
- –10% Crew Swaps
- –70% Planning Effort
For airlines with fleets of 100 or 125 aircraft, these results generate over €4M in annual savings. The savings scale with fleet size, demonstrating that tail assignment is more than a mere planning step—it is a lever for both profit and sustainability.
Conclusion
In the face of growing competitive and environmental pressures, airlines cannot afford fragile, reactive planning processes. Tail assignment, when optimised, becomes a high-impact opportunity: reducing costs, improving reliability, enhancing the passenger experience, and contributing to sustainability goals.
Operational leaders—whether in the cockpit, in the operations control center, or in the boardroom—should treat tail assignment not as a technical afterthought but as a strategic lever for efficiency, resilience, and sustainability. By embedding intelligence and robustness into this critical planning step, Daedalus® Tail Assigner enables airlines to unlock millions in annual savings, strengthen OTP, and lay the foundation for greener, more reliable operations.
For a deeper dive into how smarter tail assignment can unlock efficiency, resilience, and sustainability for airlines, we invite you to explore our full white paper. Download the report here.
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by Elsie Clark | Sep 23, 2025 | Innovation, Sustainability
The International Air Transport Association (IATA) has published a global feedstock assessment for sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), finding that production potential is 100 million tonnes (Mt) short of what is required by 2050.
The report estimates that the aviation industry will need 500Mt of sustainable aviation fuel in 2050 to achieve net-zero carbon emissions. After assessing global feedstock availability, technological adoption, and regional capacity, IATA forecasts that 400Mt could be produced by 2050.
Given that SAF production currently sits at 2Mt, this would be a significant achievement. Yet such forecasts still fall well short of global requirements for aviation to operate at net-zero carbon emissions.
IATA report that what’s holding SAF scaleup back is not feedstock availability, but technology. Achieving necessary levels of SAF production requires a substantial increase in renewable energy programmes, as well as commercial SAF facilities. More production sites need to be reaching maturity over the coming years for 2050 to 500 Mt by 2050 to remain a reasonable target.
The research also finds that the US, Europe, India, and Brazil will become SAF production hotspots, accounting for more than 50% output. Scaling these centres will require strong regional leadership and commitment to investing in a greener future for aviation.
Willie Walsh, IATA’s Director General, commented:
With this study it becomes clear that we can make SAF the solution it needs to be for aviation’s decarbonisation. The potential to turn SAF feedstock into real SAF production is in the hands of policymakers and business leaders, particularly in the energy sector.
The conclusion of this study is an urgent call to action. We have just 25 years to turn this proven potential into reality.
Join us at Aerospace Tech Week 2026 to discuss the future of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF).
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by Elsie Clark | Sep 17, 2025 | Innovation, Sustainability
According to the IEA, aviation is responsible for around 2.5% of the world’s carbon emissions. To make the industry more sustainable and accelerate a net-zero future, airlines need to plot a realistic roadmap for emissions reduction.
In this exclusive interview, Aerospace Tech Review talks to Jolanda Stevens, Program Manager, Zero Emission Aviation, from KLM. The Dutch national carrier published its first Climate Action Plan in 2022, and has now developed a range of short- and long-term strategies to mitigate emissions.
In the long term, of course we have new technologies like hydrogen, batteries, electric, and underlying all of these is alternative aviation fuel.
To take immediate action on waste reduction, KLM uses an artificial intelligence (AI) system to determine which foods should be packed onboard. This has reduced the airline’s food waste by 63%.
Looking at the bigger picture, the airline has a robust fleet renewal plan and aims for 80% of its aircraft to be energy-efficient models by 2030. As the momentum behind sustainable fuel ramps up, Stevens discusses KLM’s ongoing plans to fly their first zero-carbon emissions flight before the end of the decade. In partnership with ZeroAvia, a flight demonstration with a hydrogen-powered engine is also expected for 2026.
If you’re looking at new technologies then the infrastructure has to be there, and for hydrogen that is totally different to what we have today. On the other hand, once the infrastructure is there, you can scale that up in different steps.
Driving sustainability across organisations with as many moving parts as airlines is a technologically complex and lengthy process. As Stevens highlights, if easy wins were possible, they would have been achieved already. Nevertheless, her outlook for the future remains positive.
Investing in new technologies and helping new startups, new parties in the field who have disruptive ideas, is very necessary for the future. I think we should all step in and help them.
🎥 Watch the full interview below to hear more from Jolanda on KLM’s sustainable operations journey.
Questions asked include:
- Could you give us an overview of the zero-emission programme at KLM?
- Can you talk us through some of the sustainable technologies and innovations you’ve adopted over the years?
- How confident are you that infrastructural challenges can be overcome?
- Are there any ‘quick wins’ for sustainability in aviation?
Join us at Aerospace Tech Week 2026 to discuss the future of sustainable aviation, including operational efficiency, sustainable fuels, and hybrid engines.
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