The Aviation Challenge: how SkyTeam is uniting the industry to drive change through innovation

 

Three years ago, SkyTeam inaugurated The Sustainable Flight Challenge, the industry’s first competition of its kind to encourage innovation and action that can help reduce the impact of flying. Now SkyTeam has renamed its ground-breaking initiative as The Aviation Challenge, reflecting its broader vision to drive meaningful change industry-wide. To take its mission even further, the alliance has opened the Challenge to non-SkyTeam airlines for the very first time. 

This year, SkyTeam is uniting 24 global airlines - including newest member Virgin Atlantic and future member SAS - in a shared ambition to discover and implement ideas that have the potential to reduce air travel’s environmental impact. And in a first for the leisure travel market, non-SkyTeam affiliated airlines TUI Airline and Corendon Dutch Airlines will also take part.

Implementing innovation
Participating airlines commit to sharing their learnings and best-practices to help further industry-wide change. Since the launch of the first Challenge in 2022, 465 different solutions have been generated by participating airlines to help reduce CO2 emissions across all areas of airline operations, such as: increasing the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), flight path optimization, waste reduction and cargo handling, amongst others.  While the first two Challenges focused on finding new ideas, The Aviation Challenge is now focused on putting these solutions into practice to show how they might be effectively scaled and rolled-out across the wider industry.

Advancing progress
For this year’s Challenge, airlines will focus on scaling solutions from the first two Challenges across their entire operations. Participants can operate a showcase flight to demonstrate how they have implemented and integrated previously generated ideas. Virgin Atlantic will share key learnings from its Flight100, the first flight to be powered 100% using sustainable aviation fuel.

The submissions will be analyzed by a diverse judging panel of global sustainability and aviation experts, awarding those that best demonstrate the impact and the scale of the solutions implemented. The criteria have been developed in partnership with leading aerospace experts including PA Consulting and the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Center (NLR).

The 72 flights operated as part of last year’s Challenge delivered an average improvement of 19% in CO2 intensity compared to the same flights operated the previous month, eliminating 30 tons of emissions. More information about the impact of SkyTeam’s Challenge in 2023 is available here.

The Aviation Challenge 2024 participants
The airlines participating in The Aviation Challenge this year are: Aerolineas Argentinas, Aeromexico, Air Europa, Air Europa Express, Air France, China Airlines, China Eastern Airlines, Corendon Dutch Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Endeavor Air, Garuda Indonesia, JamboJet, Kenya Airways, KLM, KLM Cityhopper, Korean Air, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Saudia, Shanghai Airlines, TAROM, TUI Airline, Vietnam Airlines, Virgin Atlantic and XiamenAir.

Tags: The Aviation Challenge, SkyTeam