Eco-piloting

PILOTING IN A ECO-RESPONSIBLE WAY

Eco-piloting, or eco-responsible piloting, immediately reduces the fuel consumption of aircraft, both on the ground and in flight.
Air France has been training  its pilots in eco-piloting for many years. In the same way as eco-driving a car, the aim of eco-piloting is to identify and implement piloting techniques to improve flight efficiency, both on the ground and during the flight, with a view to reducing fuel consumption, without any impact on flight safety or punctuality.

SOME CONCRETE EXAMPLES OF ECO-PILOTING ACTIONS

When taxiing on the runway, pilots can use only one of the two engines of the aircraft. On a Airbus A350, this saves up to 700kg of fuel on depature and on arrival
Our pilots use innovative tools that allow them to adapt their trajectories to optimise fuel consumption. These tools, proposed by innovative start-ups, are based on artificial intelligence: this is the case of the French start-up Openairlines, and its SkyBreathe solution, or the company SafetyLine with its OptiDirect application.
On the ground, before starting up the engines, pilots can use the electricity available from the bridge rather than the aircraft's auxiliary power unit (APU), which consumes fuel.

The practice of eco-piloting is one of the initiatives of Air France’s fuel plan. Today, these initiatives give rise to an average saving of 4 to 5% in fuel consumption, and therefore in CO₂ emissions.

Air France is committed to contributing, together with civil aviation and air traffic authorities, to measures that will enable us to go even further: the generalization of continuous descent, particularly to Paris, and  the Single European Sky project - enabling air traffic optimization which could reduce aviation emissions in Europe by 10%.