Aviation experts echoed Nawal K. Teneja’s contention that airlines have to be much smarter not only about data collection but how it can be used to improve efficiency but to save money and reduce emissions. Related Story And, like Taneja, experts agree that airline management is largely unprepared to be able to take advantage of emerging technologies to help them reduce costs and emissions.

Speaking at Aviation Today’s latest webinar – The New World Order: How Global “Green” Regs Will Affect You – Bob Saia, Vice President, Pratt & Whitney Next Generation Product Family. Robert Kokonis, Partner / Supply Chain & Price Risk Management leader, BMB Fuel Consulting Services, Brian O'Dell, Vice President, Sales and Service, ReadyJet and Aviation Maintenance Editor in Chief Joy Finnegan agreed that data collection is only one method to help airlines while emerging technologies as well as operational strategies such as engine washing can achieve more. They stressed that with a looming carbon tax it will be critical to verifying emissions.

Interestingly, all four agreed that investment in NextGen will achieve even greater cost and environmental gains, but devoted little time during the webinar to the discussions because, as Finnegan put it, there is no telling when it will come. She emphasized the need to take advantage of what is available now.

“The aviation industry has actually said that if we could get to this NextGen system, that there could be anywhere between 5% and 12% of fuel savings associated just with air traffic control, said Saia. “And there's also an additional 2% to 5% associated with just the operations such as how you manage with that new system around an airport. And then there's another element that as the equipment becomes much quieter, so that when an airplane gets to be a Stage 4 minus 20 decibels, which is kind of the key threshold area, the airplane now has the ability to operate outside – on the best runway versus running on a trajectory path to avoid community noise limitations.”

Data collection will also be critical to making the case for increased investment in new technologies and procedures that help the bottom line, said Kokonis.

“The CFO of El Al recently told me how his vice president reports periodically on various initiatives,” he said. “But the challenge they're having is how you actually measure progress in an area. Another airline might have, for example, a need to reduce APU usage and it's going to require some money as a project to launch it. How do you justify at the CFO level, the money you need to launch that sort of project? So it's critical that you have some sort of business intelligence, a technology that can pull real time data from ACARS, from flight planning systems, from flight data points, even a need from the wealth of data that exists in an engine environment as well, and put that into a powerful tool that can slice and dice and track, report, and measure to give carriers an understanding that they may have a problem calculating zero fuel weight. Once you can measure that, you can drive the fuel costs down, and emissions becomes simply an icing on the cake.”

Kokonis noted that BMB Fuel Consulting Services has been involved with over 100 gap analyses around the world. “The average experience of those carriers is in the realm of 3% to 5% reduction in their fuel costs from everything from core washes to single engine taxis, to dispatch techniques, to reducing onboard weight,” he said. “And if the median is 4%, in reality they are probably only achieve 50% of that for cultural reasons, process reasons, regulatory reasons. But still, even 2% to 3% is a pretty darn good level and for every carrier that has gone through this process, there's triple the amount or four times the amount that still have not done that. So again, carriers have to get ready to understand how efficient they are, and more important, they need to have the technology to actually be able to measure the improvements that they've identified.”

He said the industry needs to change the whole paradigm. “For years, the airline business would throw hot bodies at the problems,” he said. “But as we've seen especially the downsizing the past year, that makes using IT smarter more critical. So you have to start by implementing this type of business intelligence tracking, because that is actually going to tell you specifically where you've got a problem. If you've got a 300-aircraft fleet and your flight dispatch guys are consistently not estimating zero fuel weight correctly that is going to be a multi-million dollar impact. That’s your return on investment.”

The four also turned their focus to fuel efficiency noting that aircraft fuel efficiency has improved by more than 70%, dropping carbon and hydrocarbon related emissions anywhere from 50% to 90%. Even so, the urged more research to achieve more, especially as carbon trading schemes are definitely in the offing.

“Over the last say one to two decades, all of the engine manufacturers have been working on fuel efficiency,” noted Saia. “And as part of fuel efficiency, also working specific technologies on how we use fuel to generate power for the engines. And so combustor technology, the materials that we use, how we atomize the fuel and burn the fuel to create much lower emissions even if the fuel usage was the same. We've been averaging, as an industry, about 1% improvement in fuel efficiency per year. And as we've been doing that, we've been growing aircraft size from under 100 to now, with the introduction of the A380 last year, aircraft that can carry well over 500 people. So the cost, or the amount of fuel used per passenger flight mile has gone down significantly as the industry has really made these passenger liners much, much more efficient. The question is whether or not airlines will be unfairly penalized for that if we are going to be measured on the basis of aircraft weight in carbon trading.”

“The last thing this already over-taxed sector needs like a hole in the head are more taxes,” said Kokonis. “Arguably would that inhibit some carriers' abilities to invest in the very technologies for which they need to help mitigate some of the effects of the taxes. But these initiatives seem to be a juggernaut. There will be some financial impact, but the time is now for airlines to quickly put together an action plan to address not just improved efficiency which they've already generally been doing with fleet upgrades and operational gap analysis. But they have to understand how they are going to validate those carbon invoices. And that's a problem. A number of airlines have said to us that we just don't know what we're going to do when we get to 2013.

“What sort of scares us is the lack of readiness of a lot of carriers for this,” added Kokonis. “There's been a flurry of press releases the past few weeks, announcing various carbon or emissions tracking tools. And that's all great. In fact, I just had a discussion with an executive vice president of a very large airline that said they're scared of not being in a position to refute or validate invoices that are going to come from various carbon taxes. He agreed that the starting point for that is not to invest money in a pure emissions tracking technology, but you have to measure fuel reduction. But without a national ability to measure and track and validate that, I'm not really sure how much the airlines are going to be able to accomplish from all those gap analyses. So again, it comes down to having the technology in place to be able to measure and track and reduce fuel consumption whether it's weight related initiatives, whether it's routing or efficiency, or flight planning related initiatives, it all comes down to reducing consumption which drives down emissions.”

He noted that about 90% of carriers have a problem with calculating zero fuel weight, problems with APU over usage, center of gravity, onboard weight potable water, seals around doors, maintenance issues, specific procedures, dispatch, reduce flap landings, according to the gap analyses his company does. “Many carriers don't really know necessarily exactly how efficient they are and the worry right now with oil at that $40 to $50 level, is that sense of complacency. And we're worried that there's going to be a double whammy within a couple of years of, again, spiking oil combined with the implementation of the various carbon trading schemes and taxes. And it's going to come back to haunt us if we don't start to get prepared now for it.

“I think we do agree that we would much prefer not a punitive approach to the business but one that would help to promote airlines' investment in new technologies and in efficiencies,” he continued. “The European Commission, in January of last year, launched a joint public/private partnership to develop green aviation technology that's called Clean Sky Initiative that started off with €1.6 billion in funding. And once again, the whole drive is to develop cleaner products. They've got some lofty goals to cut C02 by 50%, nitrous oxide by 80%, and noise pollution by 50%. And that's all important. And those types of initiatives are encouraging because they're a positive reinforcement of the already very good level of initiatives that this sector has invested in.”

He also said that increased pressure needs to be put on investing in air traffic management systems, noting that increase of air routes in China. “We saw some very positive news out of China this week with an announcement that the Civil Aviation Authority of China will be opening up 35 new air routes this year,” he said, “I think the combined aggregate total is about 1,800 miles or 2,900 kilometers reduction of those 35 routes. On an individual basis, 80 miles, 100 miles may not seem like a lot, but over multiple carriers' operations throughout the year, it is quite significant. There are also other initiatives, opening up closed airspace, for instance, and the move to required navigation performance, RNP, is taking hold in the U.S. all of which will help.”

Saia noted the liters per passenger miles has been consistently dropping and, with the Bombardier CSeries promises to go down further. “If you look at today's aircraft being delivered today, the average aircraft, for per passenger miles, overall usage is about 3.5 liters per kilometer to operate the aircraft,” he noted. “If you put that on a passenger-mile base, it's just under 70 passenger miles per gallon of fuel. The A380 and the Boeing 787, are targeting to be about three liters per kilometer, so about another 15% improvement. If you look at now what these next generation aircraft are looking at, for instance the C Series with our PurePower PW1000G, we will be well into the two liters per kilometer. So the industry, if you look at what the aviation manufacturers are doing, we are driving on a mileage basis, performance that the automotive industry has not yet reached.”

Kokonis also warned that while most people are talking about CO2 and nitrous oxide there are others. “We know there are five emissions released from fuel that's burned and certainly carbon dioxide is the leading one,” he said. “But you've got water vapor at about 1.2 to 1.3 tons emitted per ton of fuel that's burned. The rest of the emissions, nitrous oxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon monoxide are relatively smaller traits compared to that. But even in the science of emissions there's still not universal agreement. Even the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has changed its opinion at least once on the subject of radiative forcing. What radiative force is saying is that emissions released at altitude has a compounding factor of between 1.9 and 2.7 which would raise that greenhouse gas percentage share of the total world from aviation to the 8% to 9% level from the 3% estimated without radiative forcing. I recognize caution that there is considerable discussion in some circles as to what that level should be. Others, like the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, are trying to find out exactly what it should be. Other scientists say its bunk theory, radiative forcing simply does not exist. So when we throw out numbers, take it with a bit of a grain of salt.”

ReadyJet’s O’Dell noted engine washing as an initiative that could be done now saying the cleaner the core of the engine, the lower the temperature and better fuel efficiency.

“We've done over 7,000 engine washes since we've developed this new EcoPower cleaning process,” said Saia of Pratt’s system. “And the average of the improvements that we've seen, the fuel improvements, is over 1%, it's actually about 1.2% fuel efficiency improvement associated with our wash.”

O’Dell indicated it should be done twice a year. “It’s cycle driven,” he said. “Obviously the more cycles, the lower the atmosphere, generally the dirtier the engine, the more often it needs to be washed. But as a rule, twice a year. A lot of Pratt's data has shown that through a regular program of sustaining your engines twice a year with a thorough engine wash, it can actually add 1,000 to 1,500 cycles per engine of on-wing life. So there's a double plus with keeping the engines clean other than fuel savings. It's on-wing life. For every dollar that is spent in engine wash, there's generally a payback of $2 to $4 for fuel you no longer have to purchase. And we're trying to take that a step further with partnering it with other services that are available using new technology as far as paint sealers, reactive polymers. Wind tunnel testing at NASA has showed that if you apply good paint sealers to your paint and aluminum, you can reduce your fuel burn by as much as 1.7%.”

Clearly, data collection and efficiency analysis, coupled with such things as engine washes are just a few of the initiatives airlines can undertake to reduce both costs and emissions but they will also serve to minimize the coming carbon tax.