Carbon Footprint

New ideas and mechanisms to reduce carbon footprint in Indian aviation

A three way framework can be used to adopt the best practices from other countries in order to reduce the carbon footprint of the aviation sector in India:

Figure 16: A three way framework to completely cover all aspects of aviation carbon footprint management

Air traffic management and operations

Single engine taxi and taxi-out

This mechanism refers to utilizing only one engine of the aircraft while the plane is still not in the air. Shutting down one engine during landing or just during take-off can lead to potential savings of 26000 kg of CO2 every year per aircraft. For a fleet of 20 aircrafts, an airline can save nearly 0.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year. GoAir

There can be 2 approaches to usage of biofuels in aircrafts instead of jet fuel- a) Replacing jet fuel completely with biofuels or b) Increasing the proportion of biofuels in the jet fuel mixture used for flying. The second approach is seen to be more acceptable as airlines are concerned about the impact of biofuels on the existing engines, the flying time and general performance of the aircraft. The EU has set the goal of shifting its fuel base with 40% biofuels by 2030.

British Airways and Virgin Atlantic are founding members of the Sustainable Aviation Fuel Users Group (SAFUG) which advocates extensive usage of biofuels in airlines in the EU. The group is responsible for the start of the usage of biofuels by the two founding airlines and Thomson Airlines, which runs on 100% biofuel currently.

Apart from using chemically created biofuels especially for airlines from the labs, Virgin Atlantic also partnered with LanzaTech, a research organization that helped create a plant to tap carbon monoxide released in industrial plants and convert it to jet fuel using successive chemical processes. While this fuel is currently expensive, this is a very important step that airlines can take to reduce air pollution of other industries, move towards carbon neutrality on their own and hence reduce emissions not just in aviation but also manufacturing, oil and gas, steel,

• Revise Route Dispersion Guidelines: As per Indian government rules, airlines are supposed to maintain some flights to Tier- 2 towns so as to provide them better connectivity. Occupancy on these routes is very low and hence GHG emissions occur for a very small passenger base. Estimation of the passenger traffic should be done appropriately before deciding upon the number of compulsory flights to be allocated to Tier-2 and lower airports.

• Limit fuel carriage: ATF in India is imported and hence transporting it to different states has led to all states imposing VAT on it along with the heavy import duty. This creates different price points of ATF in different states in India, due to which airlines are continuously purchasing ATF for lower prices in one or two states and then transporting it to several other states back and forth, leading to an increase in load on the aircraft. The amount of fuel that can be carried this way should be