Seizing green trade opportunities overseas

At the Dubai Air Show in November 2021, I signed the contract for an historic green aviation alliance between my company SATAVIA and Etihad Airways. The alliance is historic because Etihad is the first airline to introduce aircraft contrail prevention capacity into day-to-day aviation, offering the capacity to cut up to 60% of per-flight climate impact. This is a high-impact green solution, and one linked to a new verified carbon market worth up to $9bn globally - but our alliance with Etihad was by no means inevitable. To get there, SATAVIA firstly had to navigate some choppy waters, starting with the disruption COVID-19 caused for the entire aerospace industry. This disruption wiped out the market for our legacy product, but also gave us the chance to embrace new and more climate-focused activity, eventually leading to our entry into global green markets.

Learning point one: be prepared to pivot towards green opportunities

Our legacy product - DECISIONX:FLEET - monitors asset exposure to airborne contaminants, enabling smarter maintenance planning for aircraft operators. Things were hotting up for FLEET when COVID-19 came along and grounded almost the entire global civil aviation fleet, wiping out our immediate market.

Fortunately, we made a serendipitous discovery at about this time – a discovery that pushed SATAVIA in a decisively green direction. During lockdown, we realised that our high-altitude ice crystal prediction capability – developed to monitor the impact of ice on jet engine performance – could also be used to predict the formation of aircraft contrails, which cause surface warming by reflecting heat downwards. Contrails are a big issue in climate terms, with a footprint equivalent to almost four times the UK’s annual emissions. So if you can predict their formation, and re-route aircraft away from high-risk zones, you can solve up to two-thirds of aviation’s climate impact, overnight. Right in the middle of the pandemic, we had stumbled across a new and potentially high-impact green application of our core technology.

Learning point two: invest in opportunities to increase visibility and market education

Right from the start, it seemed likely that aviation would seek to build back better once COVID-19 was over, and especially regarding sustainability. And we’d found a way to help the sector do just that: a software solution offering high-impact climate benefit on far shorter timescales than other green aviation initiatives, typically focusing on multi-year or decadal developments of new airframes, fuels, and propulsion systems. We built a contrail prevention platform on our core tech, called it DECISIONX:NETZERO, and began engaging with commercial airlines and other stakeholders to gauge appetite for our new green aviation offering.

It wasn’t possible, though, to dive straight into contracts for NETZERO. For one thing, we needed to gather detailed user requirements to develop a commercially viable product. For another, while contrail science is well established, we realised that market awareness – while rising – was still low among key stakeholders. For these reasons, we applied to – and were selected for - Dubai’s Aviation X Lab (AXL).

AXL is an incubator supported by five global aerospace giants: Emirates, Airbus, GE, Collins, and Thales. AXL therefore led to our first contrail prevention interaction with a commercial airline (Emirates), enabling us to develop the multi-step process involved in contrail prevention and climate benefit accounting. We also gained significant visibility within relevant market segments, generating significant inbound interest and helping us to establish contact with Etihad personnel – which led in turn to the twelve-month proof-of-concept contract that I signed in Dubai in November 2021.

Learning point three: Concentrate resources at the decisive point i.e. a reference customer

From February 2022, SATAVIA began weekly contrail prevention flight planning exercises, analysing Etihad’s entire flight schedule to target and optimise flights with predicted contrail climate impact. In addition, we worked with Etihad to optimise more than twenty flights in the lead up to Earth Day (22^nd April 2022), cutting more than 3,250 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) via contrail prevention. To put this in context, that’s equivalent to eliminating 100,000 car journeys of 50km each (US emissions figures).

To enable this kind of extraordinary climate saving, we had to make Etihad’s priorities our own. We worked closely with a wide range of Etihad stakeholders, ranging from flight dispatchers to C-suite executives, ensuring face-to-face interaction wherever possible and taking account of differing working cultures and logistics (e.g. European vs Abu Dhabi working weeks and calendars). We continuously iterated and improved our offering against gradually revealed operational needs, reinforcing the need for adaptability in the face of customer requirements.

We’ve since experienced significant recognition for our green aviation activity, including Solar Impulse Foundation labelling alongside nomination for the Earthshot Prize, the world’s most prestigious environmental award. We’ve also had coverage in leading global outlets like New Scientist and The Times, and are beginning to grow our customer base with other leading global airlines. But without our beachhead customer Etihad, none of this would have been possible on the same timescales.

Learning point four: Consider innovative paths to monetisation of green offerings

In tight-margin industries like aviation, innovations must bring some kind of value to the table – e.g. marketing credentials or revenue generation, or ideally both. In the case of contrail prevention, we strove from the very beginning to find a path to monetisation so that aircraft operators would have the strongest possible incentive to engage in greener flight operations. And it soon transpired that the best path to monetisation was via offsetting.

With an offsetting approach to contrail prevention, operators using our DECISIONX:NETZERO platform can verify achieved climate benefit and convert this into tradable carbon credits, thus generating revenue from each successful contrail prevention flight. To enable this process, we’re currently engaging with leading global voluntary carbon programmes for methodology accreditation, as well as partnering with innovative carbon trading exchanges like AirCarbon Exchange - offering ground-breaking trading opportunities to our commercial partners, and creating a new verified carbon market worth up to $9bn at current carbon prices (forecast to rise to $90bn by 2030).

Our green aviation journey is just beginning – but by pivoting to green opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic, taking advantage of stepping-stones along the way, focusing our resources on a beachhead customer, and developing innovative paths to monetisation, we gave ourselves the best possible chance to engage with global green markets to help the aviation industry build back better.