Luxaviation Gets Emissions and SAF Support with Celeste

Aircraft management and charter operator Luxaviation Belgium has integrated Azzera’s Celeste platform with its flight scheduling platform to manage use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and carbon credits. The system was specifically developed to support compliance with the European Union’s ReFuelEU SAF mandate.

According to Swiss-based Azzera, Celeste helps aircraft operators enable their passengers to pay for SAF use and carbon credits to cover their flights. Given limited SAF supplies, most of these transactions are currently based on book-and-claim arrangements.

Celeste uses application programming interface (API) technology to generate accurate summaries of carbon emissions from flights based on actual flight and fuel data. Azzera said the platform simplifies the emissions management process and ensures compliance by assigning each flight to the correct carbon credit market, providing accurate data to support compliance and mitigation.

For Luxaviation, adopting the technology is part of its wider Go-to-Zero program to reduce the business aviation services group’s environmental footprint. Its subsidiary in Belgium operates business aircraft and helicopters and is one of the larger entities in the group.

“Connecting our flight scheduling software to Celeste has transformed how we manage compliance and sustainability,” said Ward Bonduel, CEO of Luxaviation Belgium. “Automatic flight and fuel data gives us real-time visibility into our ReFuelEU and emissions trading scheme obligations so we can act on them immediately. It is efficient and accurate, and positions Belgium at the forefront of sustainability innovation within the group, reinforcing our long-term commitment to a more sustainable future.”

According to Azzera’s CEO, Puja Mahajan, the ability to access Celeste digital tools through a single interface significantly reduces the time and manual work associated with emissions monitoring, reporting, and verification. “It just takes the data the operations produce to find the emissions produced by each aircraft to generate compliance data by forecasting how much over the permitted threshold a flight might be and indicating how much this will cost, whether it involves book and claim, carbon credits, or managing SAF inventory,” she explained.

Airlines Face Greater Burden

Increasingly, Azzera is seeking to support regional airlines for which the emissions compliance burden is greater than in business aviation. The company also supports airports, FBOs, aircraft manufacturers, and maintenance, repair, and overhaul companies.

Azzera creates an API integration for each operator based on their IT infrastructure. “We look at how they do things and during a set-up period understand their processes and how to create the fastest connection that can be automated and live,” Mahajan told AIN.

From her perspective, both the airlines and business aviation operators are still having to come to terms with the new EU-ETS, ReFuelEU, and CORSIA environmental requirements. “It’s not settling down and is still quite a dynamic situation,” she commented. “Everyone is on tenterhooks, and we’re still expecting the non-CO2 rules [covering contrails] to come in this year in the EU. You can end up paying twice the cost of the fuel for a flight if you don’t refuel enough at EU airports, and we can monitor this through Celeste so that you can see the risk of a penalty and avoid missing the thresholds.”

Despite the challenges around compliance, Azzera believes that the requirements are helping to increase SAF production. “But there won’t be widespread adoption until e-fuels are commercialized on a much larger scale, and one of the biggest obstacles to adoption now is the paperwork, which is the challenge we’re addressing,” Mahajan added.

The pending regulations covering non-CO2 emissions could prove to be an even bigger issue for aircraft operators. The aviation sector is also facing the phasing out of current free allowances, and when that happens, operators will have to bear the full cost of emissions trading, which Mahajan said will likely be passed through to airline passengers and private jet owners alike.