SIA and Singapore Civil Aviation launch green city pair flights

Los Angeles to Singapore flight for ASPIRE partnership

The Asia and Pacific Initiative to Reduce Emissions (ASPIRE) partnership is launching regular ‘green’ flights across Asia and the Pacific. These come under the ‘ASPIRE-Daily City Pair’ programme, which aims to deliver gate-to-gate environmental best practices for pairs of airports throughout the Asia Pacific, one of the fastest growing aviation markets in the world. The first daily ‘city pair’ flight was launched between Auckland and San Francisco on 21 February 2011.

More of such ‘city pair’ flights will be implemented over the next few months by ASPIRE partners.
On 16 May 2011, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore (CAAS) and Singapore Airlines (SIA), working together with the United States Federal Aviation Administration and the Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines, are launching the second regular ‘city pair’ – Los Angeles (LAX) to Singapore (SIN) – flight.  SIA flight SQ37, which operates non-stop from Los Angeles to Singapore, will employ enhanced gate-to-gate air traffic management operational procedures to reduce fuel burn and carbon emissions in all phases of the flight.

Mr Yap Ong Heng, Director-General of CAAS, said, “CAAS aims to actively contribute to reducing aviation’s environmental footprint where we can.  Hence, our participation in the ‘ASPIRE-Daily City Pair’ programme, with the launch of the LAX-SIN ‘city-pair’ with SIA. This will clearly demonstrate how collaboration among ASPIRE partners, airlines and other Air Navigation Service Providers in employing best practices and technologies in air traffic management can achieve significant reductions in fuel consumption and carbon emissions for flights.”

The following air traffic management best practices, which significantly reduce fuel burn and carbon emissions, will be utilised for the LAX-SIN ‘green’ flight:

•  ‘User-Preferred Routes’, ‘Dynamic Airborne Reroute Procedures’ and
• ‘30/30 Reduced Oceanic Separation’, which allow pilots to take full advantage of atmospheric conditions, such as prevailing winds, to reduce separation between aircraft and shorten flight time;
•  ‘Time-Based Arrivals Management’ and
• ‘Arrivals Optimisation’ which allow aircraft to fly with engines set at idle mode in continuous descent from a high altitude during the landing phase of the flight, thus reducing fuel burn.

 “We are pleased to be able to implement these flight procedures on a regular basis, and see this as yet another step towards greener skies. We will be monitoring the flight closely to track the fuel and emission savings, but we expect to reduce fuel burn by 2 tonnes and achieve carbon emission savings of around 6.3 tonnes for each Los Angeles-Singapore sector,” says Singapore Airlines’ Senior Vice-President Flight Operations Gerard Yeap.

Each ‘ASPIRE-Daily City Pair’ is star-rated based on the number of best practice procedures employed, with three stars representing the minimum required and five stars indicating that all identified best practices are employed.  The LAX-SIN ‘city pair’ is assigned a 4-star rating.

In 2008/09, the ASPIRE partners undertook a series of demonstration flights (linking NZ, Australia and the US). Each flight had access to the most advanced air navigation services and aircraft fuel optimisation initiatives currently available. Data gathered from these flights indicated an average 4% fuel savings and up to 15,000kg reduction in CO2 emissions.

For more detailed information about ASPIRE-Daily: www.aspire-green.com/

Valere Tjolle
Valere Tjolle is editor of the Sustainable Tourism Report Suite – special offers HERE