Etihad Aviation Group CEO Tony Douglas at CAPA’s Airlines in Transition 2022 summit

Transcript

Tony Douglas:So for everybody, probably the hardest 2 and a half years in civil aviation. But allow me to go back to 2021. It was almost a game of two halves. The first half of the year heavily impacted by travel restrictions, and slowly As they started to ease, we saw in the second half of the year a significant increase in load factors, and particularly in Q4 of last year. And the good news, I think, certainly for us at Etihad, is Q1 of this year up to now has almost been a record breaker. I know some people talk about revenge tourism. There is definitely a pent-up demand for the traveling community to get back to normality. And in terms of load factors over the last 2 weeks on our network, we've been in the low 80s. Which quite frankly we've not seen since pre-pandemic. So hopefully that can continue. But as ever, there's lots of other challenges out there. So I think in terms of travel trends, people are more used to the ambiguity of ever-changing travel restrictions and clearly pre-COVID, I think is the first thing. And the second one is the way people use the nomenclature of the business class cabin is no longer as relevant to per se business class travelers, you know, sponsored by their employer. But now We've seen load factors in our you know business class products being ahead of what they always used to be in the past as a percentage, and the reason why is people are prepared to pay for extra space from a wellness point of view. But there is slightly more disposable income out there at the moment, which we're seeing in ticket yields which are holding up, which is obviously for us good news. And as a consequence, our Q1 performance for this year is going to be a record breaker. So it's been a really special week for us, obviously being here today. But Thursday of last week, we took our first A350-1000, and this one is a persona. It's actually the Sustainable 50 into Paris on its first ever revenue flight. Why the Sustainable 50? Well, this aircraft, like its sibling, the Greenliner, which of course is a Boeing product, has been allowed into service to become a flying testbed, the sort of product that what we want to do is attract great ideas no matter where they come from in order to fly them and to test them. Of course, it is an A350 powered by Rolls-Royce XWB engines, the most modern in control systems, 25% more fuel efficient than its predecessors. And back to the Greenliner, we've broken all sorts of records. So currently we have the world's longest flight with 50% sustainable aviation fuel, a 14-hour flight. An important Tony Douglas. Thank you, Tony. So, very importantly, last October we broke all manner of records in flying the Greenliner from London Heathrow to Abu Dhabi. There were 4 components that I'll explain that contributed to a 72% reduction in the carbon footprint from its equivalent flight with us in 2019. Now, many people will say, my goodness me, how could you make such a big step against net zero in such a short period of time? And the bad news is most of it isn't repeatable. So the 4 elements The comparable aircraft in 2019 was an A380, and of course heavy old-generation engines, etc., against the Dreamliner. The second component was we have 38% sustainable aviation fuel on board, and the reason why it was 38% is sadly we couldn't get the 50% we wanted, and it's between 3 and 5 times more expensive than regular jet fuel, so that's not a sustainable proposition. The third element of it is working with Eurocontrol and with air traffic control in Abu Dhabi is an almost direct route flight plan and continuous descent. Save 40 minutes off the flight time, 6 tonnes of CO2. But of course, that's not repeatable either anytime soon. And the 4th major element was using some really clever evolving technology in predicting barometric pressure, air temperature, and weather patterns, and deviating our flight plan so we can reduce condensation trails. Add all All of that together, 72% reduction. But I think what it draws the attention to is to policy setters, governments, and regulators in general that we've all got a big part to play in cracking this problem. And back to the Sustainable 50, now we'll be introducing that persona into service. You'll see an awful lot more flights of that nature to be able to pursue our ambition of carbon reduction in commercial aviation.

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