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Sweden Makes a Sustainability Leap

Despite its small size—handling just 135,000 passengers yearly—Halmstad City Airport (HAD) in June 2017 became one of the first airports in Sweden to offer sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) to its airline customers, scheduled and charter airlines, business aviation, and rescue flight operators. [SAF is also known as sustainable alternative jet fuel (SAJF).]

At the end last year, HAD took its sustainability commitment a step further and implemented a biofuel quota—at least 5 percent on average per year of an airline’s fuel uptake at the airport must be SAF. The airport’s board put SAF on its agenda in 2014 and its plans were fully in line with the goal of Halmstad municipality, HAD’s owner since 2006, to be fossil-free in 2030. 

With a 5 percent compulsory biofuel quota HAD has overtaken the ambitions of Swedavia, the Swedish state-owned company that owns and operates 10 of the country’s busiest airports including Stockholm-Arlanda, and of the Swedish government. Swedavia target is for 5 percent of all jet fuel used at its airports to be fossil-free by 2025.

Braathens Regional Airlines (BRA), the largest scheduled carrier operating at HAD, was quickly won over to use biofuel on a regular basis, the airport’s business development manager Anette Holmgren told AIN, pointing to the carrier’s internal goal to have fossil-free operations by 2030. The Sweden-based regional airline in February 2017 performed the first ever biofuel-powered flight of an ATR aircraft when an ATR 72-600 flew from Bromma-Stockholm City Airport (BMA) to Umeå, fueled 45 percent with fossil-free used cooking oil-based fuel. On May 16, the airline again teamed with the European turboprop manufacturer to operate what was dubbed the ‘Perfect Flight,’ with every element of the one-hour flight from HAD to BMA optimized to keep carbon emissions to a minimum. 

Read the full post on AIN Online

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