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AIN’s second-annual Corporate Aviation Leadership Summit (CALS) brought together a selection of business aviation thought leaders to examine and discuss some of our industry’s pressing issues. This year’s topics included training, sustainability, maintenance, organizational health, aircraft transactions, managing generational differences, and compensation.
Just a few years ago, the word “sustainability” meant ensuring the boss was happy so the flight department’s doors would remain open. Not today. Corporate flight departments are feeling internal and external pressures to make their operations more eco-friendly. There are many questions but too few answers.
In fact, according to the CALS attendees, migrating to sustainable operations is such a new trend that most of us don’t know where to start. To help provide guidance, attendees identified four key steps towards sustainability: getting started, taking measurable actions, switching to SAF, and mitigating challenges.
<h2>The First Step Is Often the Hardest</h2>
Everybody in corporate aviation wants to be more sustainable. The problem is, it’s such a broad goal that it can be tough to know where to start. As the session’s moderator, Nancy Bsales, COO of Sustainability for 4AIR, explained, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”
Her advice was to begin the process by knowing how big your operation’s carbon footprint is now. How much fuel are you using? What quantities of consumables—water bottles, catering packaging, etc.—are you using? What are the obvious areas where you can affect change without busting your budget? What are other departments in your company doing to improve sustainability?
Switching to SAF, buying carbon offsets, and switching to electric GSE units, reusable water bottles, and the like isn’t inexpensive. You need a plan, the accompanying budget, and, most of all, buy-in from upper management.
Another excellent starting point is to participate in NBAA’s Sustainable Flight Department Accreditation Program. It has four independent sections covering Flight, Operations, Ground Support, and Infrastructure and gives flight departments insights into what they can and should be doing to achieve their sustainability goals.
“We use it, and it’s given our department insights into areas we can improve our efforts,” one chief pilot said. “We are always finding ways to make changes for the better. Many of them had not occurred to us.
“It’s not hard,” he continued. “It’s just getting a little more granular in our view of things. How can crewmembers and operations become more efficient?”
<h2>Measurable Steps toward a Sustainable Operation</h2>
While transitioning to more sustainable operations may seem to be a long process, it’s not. You can take measurable steps during your next flight. Take flight planning and en-route operations, for example. Work with your flight planners and ATC to find more direct routing and request continuous descent profiles when possible.
“It’s our practice to request them,” a senior pilot said. “With the throttles to idle through the approach, it creates impressive fuel efficiency.” He also said that his company’s policy is to limit the use of the aircraft’s APU until an hour before the passengers arrive.
“And when we don’t have passengers, we do quiet shutdowns,” he added. “These are best practices that are listed in about every OEM’s AFM, but not many operators leverage them.
An international captain shared that his operation uses slower cruising speeds (when the principal on board agrees) to save fuel. As he explained, it doesn’t take a big reduction to net a significant fuel savings.
“We did a lot of analysis on our large-cabin aircraft, and when we pull back to Mach .83, we can save a significant amount of fuel,” he said. “A direct example is flying at .83 instead of .87; we can save 14 percent on a long trip, and it adds only about 20 minutes to the flight time.”
But sustainable engine operations don’t end when the flight does; another tip shared by CALS attendees was to use single-engine taxis when possible.
<h2>The Dollars-and-sense Side of SAF</h2>
In corporate aviation, SAF has become synonymous with sustainability. But it’s not yet the drop-in solution we want it to be. As you well know, SAF is often challenging to find and always expensive to buy. In fact, one director of aviation shared that the added cost to use SAF was so high for his operation that it had been listed as its own line item in the 2024 budget.&nbsp;
“Budgets drive flight departments,” he continued. “Two dollars more a gallon for SAF is hard for some operators to afford. You have to make that conscious commitment to what makes sense for your operation and stick to it. If it helps our industry's future, we can’t afford not to do it.”
In theory, anyway, the more SAF you use, the more that will be produced, and the lower the price will become. Of course, it’s not an all-or-nothing situation. You can help ease the blow to your budget’s bottom line by blending jet-A and SAF.
“If you incrementally increase the inclusion of SAF, and increase the budget to allow that, in five years or so, it will be a net-net situation,” a chief pilot said. “You can also use book-and-claim services to get SAF credit even when SAF is unavailable. It can all help ease the budget crunch.”
<h2>A Smoother Approach to Sustainability</h2>
In recent years, corporate aviation hasn’t always looked so good in the public eye. And that makes our combined shift toward more sustainable operations increasingly important. But that doesn’t mean it will go smoothly—internally or externally. There are owners who will still want to operate as if nothing has changed. It’s up to those of us sitting at the pointy end of the airplane to change their minds.
“Yes, there is some reluctance with some operators, but from what I’ve seen, it's all a lack of understanding of what they can do,” a senior flight department director said. “There are a lot of diverse opinions on things, but it’s not a political discussion; it’s a smart business discussion.”
Added a flight department manager: “Many of the challenges we see are bandwidth, budget, understanding, and support. Operators don’t know what to do. No one has ever had any training or education on aviation environmental sustainability. There isn’t any. We are all learning it together now.”
And as social and business pressures continue to ramp up, we need to learn fast. As one CALS attendee said, “At the end of the day, it’s job security. There won’t be any jobs if we don’t come together to do a much better job of operating sustainably. It is the future of our industry.”
The bottom line is that today’s corporate aircraft operators and maintainers need to be much more visible and accountable regarding our efforts to demonstrate measurable improvements in all facets of operational sustainability. The good news is that if we continue to work together to share ideas and information, that’s just what we will be able to do.

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