When it comes to lowering aviation’s carbon footprint, moonshot attempts often get the attention, yet, there may be lower hanging fruit to go for…

About a decade ago, Alexandre Feray, a former Air France executive, saw the opportunity to help airlines burn less fuel through software and algorithms. He subsequently invested €20,000 of his own savings to set up Open Airlines, a startup firm that does just that.

Open Airlines core product, called SkyBreathe, is a SaaS platform that analyzes large amounts of data about airline’s fuel consumption and flight patterns and produces a number of actionable recommendations that, the firm claims, can result in a fuel use reductions of the order of 2 to 5%. According to the company’s own estimations, in 2019, helped its airline customers save some 190,000 tons of fuel and prevented 590,000 tons of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere…As you may imagine, this is not just an environmental imperative, it also represents a very significant amount of money, since fuel is usually the single largest cost item for any airline.

In this episode of the podcast we talk with Alexandre about this entrepreneurial journey, how built Open Airlines and led it to become a global aviation software business, servicing more than 40 airlines all over the world from its base in Toulouse, France, and offices in the US and Asia.

More generally, we also talk about the ways in which existing technology can be used to squeeze additional efficiencies and not have to wait for radically new technologies to change the industry’s paradigm…

Download this episode from:

Apple Podcasts / iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts or Stitcher

Things we talk about in this episode:

The story of Open Airlines and how Alexandre used an initial €20,000 investment into a software company that today services more than 40 airlines around the world
What is SkyBreathe and how does Open Airlines’ technology work
How there are efficiency gains to be realized by flying more efficiently
What else can be done with current technology in order to reduce the industry’s fossil-fuel consumption