Sustainable Flight Challenge 2023: second round for new ideas

SkyTeam has launched its second Sustainable Flight Challenge (TSFC) to take place in May 2023. This year, it will be open to more than member airlines. Air France and KLM will participate in the challenge again, to contribute to the search for new ways to reduce air travel’s carbon footprint.

The challenge, which took place the first time in 2022, inspires airlines to operate the most sustainable flights out of the participants. This way, they can find their most sustainable solutions and share their findings with each other. This year, the challenge is being extended to ‘friends and family’ carriers that are close to SkyTeam, in order to drive the acceleration towards sustainable flight across more of the industry.

In 2022, the challenge brought 16 airlines together. They completed a total of 22 medium- and long-haul flights that already formed part of their existing networks. The friendly competition sparked hundreds of new ideas to make air travel greener and collectively improved operational efficiency by 15% across the flights operated as part of the challenge, measured by CO₂ intensity. In August 2022, participating airlines showcased their best innovations at a two-day seminar to promote best practices that can be implemented to help make travel on SkyTeam members more sustainable.

Building on these sustainability efforts, many of the new ideas from last year’s challenge will be adopted by participating airlines as part of TSFC 2023. KLM’s participating long and medium haul flights will be to Edmonton and Porto. Air France will fly to Vancouver and Lisbon.