Category Airline, Organisations & Operators, Sustainability

Airbus in partnership with Air France, Delta Air Lines, French bee, and Virgin Atlantic, and operations partners, AirNav Ireland, DSNA, EUROCONTROL and NATS, has successfully completed a new phase of trials for Airbus’ fello’fly project.

Fello’fly takes inspiration from migrating geese and showcases the power of collaboration by pairing flights to reduce fuel consumption. With this flying technique, the first aircraft creates an uplift that drives fuel efficiency for the following aircraft, called ‘wake energy retrieval’. Once operational, wake energy retrieval has the potential to make fuel savings of up to 5% on long-haul flights.

The Lufthansa Group is further expanding its group-wide fuel efficiency program, “OPS Sustainability.” The aim is to make the operational processes of all Lufthansa Group airlines more sustainable by increasing efficiency. Since 2022, more than 90 individual measures have helped to save a total of around 54,000 metric tonnes of kerosene, thereby permanently avoiding around 170,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. This corresponds to the fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions of 640 round-trip flights on the Munich–New York route with an Airbus A350-900 aircraft. Now, further measures are being added: The company has set itself the goal of avoiding around 50,000 additional tonnes of CO₂ annually across the group by the end of 2028, among other things by using new digital tools and data-based decision models. This corresponds to an additional annual fuel saving of over 15,200 metric tonnes.