Cathay aims to top IATA goal

by CHIEF CORRESPONDENT, TOM BALLANTYNE  

September 1st 2012

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For the past few months Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific Airways moved up a gear in its roadmap for cutting carbon emissions and meeting International Air Transport Association (IATA) environmental targets. The carrier’s head of environmental affairs, Mark Watson, said Cathay is now aiming for a 2% annual improvement in fuel efficiency, ahead of IATA’s goal of 1.5%. Read More »

'We always signed up for the 1.5% average fuel efficiency improvement à la IATA and for  carbon neutral growth by 2020, but we are going into a new era of having more aggressive carbon reduction targets, based on fleet acquisition, and more aggressive deployment'

Mark Watson Head of Environmental Affairs Cathay Pacific Airways

“We always signed up for the 1.5% average fuel efficiency improvement à la IATA and for  carbon neutral growth by 2020, but we are going into a new era of having more aggressive carbon reduction targets, based on fleet acquisition, and more aggressive deployment,” said Watson.

In July, the airline ordered 26 fuel efficient A350-1000s followed a month later by the conversion of another 16 orders for A350-900s into 1000s, plus other orders for B747-8 freighters and B777-300ERs.

“We decided to exceed the industry average and try for a 2% target, which was the ICAO [International Civil Aviation Organization] Assembly recommendation in 2010,” added Watson. “In real terms, we are committing to a 31% reduction in CO² per RTK [revenue tonne kilometre] over a 2009 baseline. That equates to a 2% improvement.”

Indeed, Cathay Pacific has not even factored biofuels into its more aggressive carbon reduction targets. “We didn’t want that to become a red herring,” said Watson. “We wanted to base it on what we do now and what we control.

“Biofuels is something we are actively exploring. We appointed a full-time biofuels manager in January 2012. We’re looking at all of these options, but there are still some challenges in terms of scalability, sustainability and building the market etc. We thought it would be the wrong call to put a biofuels component into that target.

“If we were to swing biofuels into our fleet then that target would look even better. We would be able to get even more aggressive reductions.”