Airlines are always on the hunt to reduce fuel burn, investing in aircraft with more fuel-efficient engines, thinner seats, and composite fuselages. EasyJet is trying to save a few bucks and reduce its environmental footprint with a new light weight paint.
Developed by Mankiewicz Aviation Coatings, the new paint will be applied to 38 aircraft initially, and will be applied to EasyJet’s entire fleet of over 300 aircraft by the end of 2030. When fully implemented, they expect a yearly savings of 1,296 tonnes (~2,857,000 pounds) of fuel and a reduction of 4,095 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
In a release, Lahiru Ranasinghe, Director of Sustainability at easyJet, said: “easyJet is constantly exploring and developing innovative solutions to lower the impact of our operations. While this forms a small part of a bigger strategy, formulating a new lightweight paint with our partners at Mankiewicz Aviation Coatings exemplifies how we’re assessing every single part of our operation to find efficiency gains to help us achieve this mission.”
Credit: easyJetIn the grand scheme, these gains are relatively small when compared to other technologies such as AeroSHARK, which have a more meaningful impact. However using a rough average of 3 tonnes of fuel burnt per sector, that’s 432 sectors worth of savings per year.
From a financial perspective, the reduced fuel burn works out to about US $1 million in savings. Even though that figure is just a fraction of the US $762 million earned in profits in the last 12 months ending September 2024, it’s still one million that could now be put towards another initiative.
With such small tolerances, the assumption is that the paint is no more expensive than what is traditionally used, and that aircraft are not being taken out of service prematurely for painting before scheduled maintenance cycles. Even though the change may not have a huge impact, it’s still good to see engineering firms slowly working to improve technology that’s not at the consumer’s expense.
Featured image: easyJet
