Maximizing Sustainability and Efficiency with Smart Operational Planning

Fuel-saving corporate initiatives, like airline policies, can help achieve fuel sustainability while still adhering to European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) requirements. Achieving fuel efficiency also requires accurate, sufficient, and meticulous operational planning that accounts for aircraft performance, weather, the International Standard Atmosphere (ISA), airport infrastructure capabilities, airline operations manual (OMA), and other relevant manuals. Advantage ATC routes are then determined in accordance with these factors. In today's highly competitive aviation sector, increasing fuel consumption by aircraft is seen as a major ineffectiveness within the aircraft and one of the biggest variable costs, if not the most. We report data on a set of flights carried out by a small fleet-sized Portuguese airline with two different aircraft types. The preliminary results, which are part of a larger survey, indicate that sustainability can be addressed with smart and effective operational planning, through reduced fuel consumption and consequent CO2 emissions.