Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder,

and today I am with the Airbus Chief Sustainability Officer, Julie Kitcher, because I want to find out

what exactly is happening with one of the world's biggest aircraft

manufacturers in terms of actually reducing the impact on the environment. So let's start with

sustainable aviation fuel. A lot of people say, yes, this is the future. If you reduce the carbon impact of flying, then we'll all be

able to fly everywhere we want to forever. Is that fair? Well, thank you for the question. It's a good

place to start. And if we take a step back, I think it's important to recognize that sustainable

aviation fuel means it's sustainable, i.e. it's not in competition

with food, it's not in competition with land, and it has to adhere to very stringent criteria.

From today's perspective, our aircraft, so Airbus aircraft, can fly with up to 50% sustainable

aviation fuel

because it behaves just like JETA1,

which is the fuel all airlines use today for their aircraft.

And before 2030, we'll work on that technological capability

to increase the possibility to put up to 100% sustainable aviation fuel in the tank.

So if we can have sustainable aviation fuel at scale, and today there are a number of

different production pathways to produce it, we begin with what we call biomass, biomass-based

or wastes, if you like.

Fuel, used cooking oil is a typical example.

And then we'll work through the timeline to then move to e-synthetic fuels and then later hydrogen.

So it's bio and e-fuel and hydrogen working all three on the same pathway. A lot of the airlines are saying to me,

yes, we'd love to do this. We've even got agreements in place to do this, but there's a couple of problems with currently available SAF, sustainable aviation fuel. It's difficult to get. There

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