Heathrow relaunches airlines’ sustainability performance league table

• Residents and stakeholders can see how airlines perform on noise and emissions

• Working with airlines, Heathrow continues to look for opportunities to minimise the impact of airport operations on the local area and environment, using public data to chart progress

Heathrow has relaunched its league table of how airlines perform on noise and emissions. Fly Quieter and Greener ranks the largest 50 airlines at the UK's hub on their performance, incentivising improvements and giving neighbours and stakeholders transparent data.

The scheme will see quarterly updates of how airlines perform against key metrics, including how loud they are, how often they operate late after 23:30 and how well they innovate to reduce noise impacts.

This quarter, the top five performing airlines are: SAS, KM Malta Airlines, LOT Polish Airlines, SWISS and Austrian Airlines.

Heathrow was the first airport in the UK to introduce this type of league table back in 2013.

Airport colleagues regularly engage with airlines to encourage the use of more efficient aircraft in their fleet, as well as trialling and rolling out new procedures that minimise the impact on local communities.

Heathrow's Chief Communication and Sustainability Officer, Nigel Milton, said: "Protecting the benefits of aviation while reducing our negative impacts needs to be a joint effort between airlines and the airport. Working with our airlines, we have already removed the loudest, most polluting aircraft from our runways, but we need to go further. Fly Quieter and Greener will help us continue to track the impact of airport operations, while letting everyone see the results for themselves."

There has already been significant progress in reducing Heathrow's noise footprint in the last few decades. Comparing 2023 to 2006, the day, evening and night (Lden 55 dB) noise contour has reduced by 41%, and core night noise contour between 23:30-06:00 (Leq,6.5h 48 dB) has reduced by 58%.

The airport's latest Noise Action Plan sets out a number of commitments to continue that trend and Fly Quieter and Greener will encourage compliance with two key parts of the Plan - quieter planes and quieter procedures. This is complemented by ongoing work to improve noise insulation in local homes and to fund research into better understanding of noise impacts.

To see the full table and find out more about how the rankings are calculated visit: A quieter Heathrow - Heathrow Fly Quieter and Greener