JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2014
Drivers of change
RICHARD ANDERSON CEO, DELTA AIR LINES AND CHAIRMAN OF IATA Anderson will have plenty on his plate in 2014, with his role as International Air Transport Association chairman overseeing the development of New Distribution Capability (NDC), as well as Delta’s move into the UK market through its joint venture with Virgin Atlantic. Delta and Virgin will be operating a combined schedule
ZHANG XIUZHI
CEO, SPRING AIRLINES Zhang is the boss and co-founder of Shanghai-based Spring Airlines, which has pioneered the low- cost model in China since it began operating in 2005. Spring has been growing rapidly in recent years – initially as a domestic carrier, before becoming the first private Chinese airline to be granted a licence to
CSR
BRITISH AIRWAYS – GREEN SKY LONDON BA’s flagship environmental project is creating Europe’s first facility that will be able to turn carbon-rich household waste into biofuel for aircraft. The airline has partnered with green technology firm Solena Fuels Corporation to build the plant on a disused industrial site in London, scheduled to open in 2015. The facility will be able to convert around 500,000
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LANZATECH The biofuels specialist, originally set up in New Zealand in 2005, has patented micro-organism technology to make ethanol from waste carbon monoxide (CO) gases from heavy industrial plants. The ethanol can then be converted into jet fuel. The firm has teamed up with Virgin Atlantic on a sustainable jet fuel project, which has already won awards for both companies.
tonnes of waste, which would otherwise be sent to landfill sites, into 50,000 tonnes of low- carbon jet fuel every year. BA has guaranteed that it will purchase the plant’s total output of biofuel for the first ten years of operation at market prices – worth a total of around US$500 million at today’s fuel prices. The project, which is costing
around £220 million, will also produce 50,000 tonnes of biodiesel per year, as well as 20,000 tonnes of bio-
The CO gas would
otherwise be flared off into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. This ‘gas fermentation’ technology captures, and then ‘recycles’, the waste carbon to create fuel. Virgin and Lanzatech claim the fuel can be produced at commercially viable cost and scale, and give the example of waste gas from steel mills: they say if the technology were applied to all suitable steel mills
naphtha, which can be used to make renewable plastics or blended into other fuels, and 11 megawatts of renewable power which can be fed into the National Grid.
BA and engine manufacturer
Rolls-Royce are also working together on an alternative fuels programme, which is in its testing phases. This project has been developed with Roundtable on Sustainable Biofuels and the UK’s National Non-Food Crops Centre.
worldwide, it could supply 19 per cent of the world’s commercial aviation fuel demand. Emma Harvey, Virgin
Atlantic’s head of sustainability, said: “People often assume that sustainability and aviation are a contradiction in terms, but we’re demonstrating that it is possible to pursue ground-breaking low-carbon solutions for our business, while preserving the significant social and economic benefits that aviation brings.”
from Heathrow starting on March 30, which is specifically aimed at business travellers and will throw down the gauntlet to the existing transatlantic joint business run by British Airways and American Airlines. But any buyers expecting to benefit from a transatlantic price war on the prized London-New York route may be disappointed – at least if you believe the comments of Willie Walsh, chief executive of BA’s parent IAG.
fly internationally in 2010. As well as Hong Kong and Macau, it now flies to destinations including Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Japan.
China has been seen as a difficult market for the low-cost sector to crack, due to its lack of spare airport capacity and dominance of the state-owned carriers, but Spring has bucked this trend. The airline has a fleet of 39
Despite BA’s long-running enmity with Virgin, and particularly with founder Sir Richard Branson, Walsh has been effusive in his praise of Anderson lately – mainly because the Delta CEO has been using “rational language” when it comes to airfares. Walsh has even described
the Virgin-Delta JV as a “positive development for us and the industry”. But will such bonhomie endure from April onwards?
Airbus A320s and made a profit of US$111 million in its last financial year. It has also harnessed social media effectively with more than 3.5 million followers on Weibo (China’s version of Twitter). Zhang will be explaining how
Spring has succeeded where other Chinese no-frills airlines have failed at the World Low- Cost Airlines Conference in Singapore in February.
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