Air France Biofuel Flight is Greenest Ever

Carrier Air France says it's performed the greenest ever commercial biofuel passenger flight.

The flight featured several eco-elements, with a biofuel blend powering its engines, the aircraft's flightpath flown so as to deliberately mitigate emissions production levels and efforts taken to keep the aircraft's overall weight down to a minimum.

The Air France airliner took off from Paris and, 80 minutes later, touched down in Toulouse.

Whilst in the air, the Airbus A312's greenhouse gas emissions only totalled 50 per cent of those expected from this type of aircraft undertaking this type of journey. Prior to the flight, its engines were loaded with a blend of standard jet fuel and bio-kerosene produced from vegetable oils.

According to Air France, this bio-kerosene constituted a wholly sustainably-sourced fuel alternative, since its production didn't disrupt the human food chain or take away vital water supplies.

Greenest Biofuel Flight

The biofuel was one aspect of this sortie but the twin-engined Airbus also taxied on the power of a single engine, carried out a steady climb out of Paris and an equally steady descent into Toulouse and was fitted with a new, reduced-weight seat design. Those ingredients combined to produce what's been dubbed the greenest ever biofuel flight.

"We are proud of the success achieved by this innovative project, which is a synthesis of our many initiatives in the area of sustainable development", Air France representative Bertrend Lebel said, in a statement. "This fully-optimised green flight is another proof of Air France's commitment to combine air transport growth with controlled CO2 emissions."

Air France Biofuel

"This flight is the perfect example of Airbus global approach towards continuously reducing aviation's CO2 footprint", the firm's environmental affairs head, Andrea Debbane, added.

"This is not just a bio-fuel flight but the first flight that really puts into practice elements in the Airbus roadmap: bio-fuels, optimised ATM [Air Traffic Management], green navigation."

Earlier this month, Virgin Atlantic Airways outlined planned to develop a novel waste gas green fuel while, back in July, Boeing and Embraer announced they'd be working on producing a sustainable sugarcane aviation biofuel.