The global representative body for the airline industry, the International Air Transport Association (IATA), has highlighted the importance of minimising aviation fuel consumption in achieving the industry’s ambition of becoming a net-zero carbon emitter by 2050. One of the means that IATA can currently make available to airlines to reduce their fuel consumption is its Fuel Efficiency Gap Analysis (FEGA) audit.

FEGA was actually launched 18 years ago. But the recent completion of the audit by LOT Polish Airlines (LOT) has caused IATA to highlight the availability to airlines of the analysis. The FEGA conducted for LOT showed that the carrier could reduce its annual fuel burn by several percent, which would also cut its annual carbon emissions by tens of thousands of tons.

“FEGA is a key IATA offering,” affirmed IATA senior VP commercial products and services Frederic Leger. “The audit not only benefits the airline undergoing the process thanks to a reduced fuel use, it also helps the whole industry improve its environmental performance. Those benefits will grow as FEGA continuously becomes more effective with accumulated experience and growing capabilities using anonymised and aggregated airline data. More importantly, realising the FEGA-identified savings will be an important support as airlines transition to [sustainable aviation fuels] in pursuit of net-zero emissions by 2050.”

Per airline audited, FEGA has identified an average fuel savings figure of 4.4%. These savings mainly come from flight operations and dispatch. If the savings identified across all the audited airlines were fully achieved, they would be equivalent to taking 3.4-million internal combustion engined cars off the road.

Regarding LOT, IATA’s FEGA team analysed the airline’s operations, using industry benchmarks, in ground operations, flight operations and flight dispatch.

“FEGA revealed specific areas where fuel efficiency improvements can be made,” reported LOT COO Dorota Dmuchowska. “The next step is implementation to actually achieve the benefits of improved environmental performance and lower operating costs.”

The areas in which the FEGA audit revealed that the most significant fuel savings could be achieved were flight planning, the reduction of emissions through aviation procedures implementation, and refuelling operations.

“Every drop counts,” highlighted IATA senior VP sustainability and chief economist Marie Owens Thomsen. “Since its inception in 2005, FEGA has helped airlines identify cumulative savings of 15.2-million tons of carbon by cutting fuel consumption by 4.76-million tons. LOT is the latest example of an airline exploring all opportunities to achieve every incremental efficiency possible in fuel consumption. That’s good for the environment and for the bottom line.”