Airbus, Air Canada Plan SAF Co-Investment Platform

Airbus and Air Canada announced plans at the Farnborough International Airshow on Monday to establish a jointly funded Sustainability Co-Investment Platform. The still-unnamed initiative aims to invest up to C$13.7 million (US$10 million) to support commercial-scale sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) production in Canada.

The platform’s central aim is to carry a jointly agreed Canadian SAF project to a final investment decision, with both partners continuing advocacy work alongside the Canadian Council for Sustainable Aviation Fuels (C-SAF), as well as federal and provincial governments. Speaking at the signing, Airbus chief sustainability officer Julie Kitcher said the funding would be split on a 50-50 basis, with Canada’s “exceptional positioning in terms of feedstock availability for the domestic market” providing opportunities for fuels made through the hydroprocessed esters and fatty acids (HEFA) pathway, gasification, and Fischer-Tropsch production from Canada’s wood residues.

Airbus also signed a five-year agreement under Air Canada’s Leave Less Travel Program, under which the airline will both track greenhouse gas emissions tied to Airbus’ corporate travel and apply verified SAF environmental attributes against those emissions on the airframer’s behalf. Airbus’ first allocation covers attributes associated with more than 60,000 liters of SAF.

Valérie Durand—Air Canada’s v-p of airport affairs, corporate real estate, and sustainability—said the carrier exceeded its target of sourcing more than 1% SAF in 2025, reaching “nearly 1.6% of SAF usage in our operations.” Asked by AIN what outcomes partners envision regarding affordability, Durand said the goal is to move aviation through the energy transition “in a way that protects affordable travel for customers,” with policy support keeping the ecosystem balanced. Neither company offered specific affordability metrics.

The platform announcement came alongside a macroeconomic study by Airbus and consulting firm ICF that Kitcher described as “highlighting Canada’s potential to lead in biofuels production.” The study found that scaling domestic production to meet 40% of Canada’s aviation fuel demand by 2040 could add C$32 billion to national GDP and create 140,000 jobs. Air Canada, which operates more than 100 Airbus aircraft such as the A220 and the recently introduced A321XLR, framed the platform as a step toward a domestic supply chain.

Both Air Canada and Airbus emphasized long-term, big-picture thinking as a virtue within the sector. Durand characterized the wider industry’s 2050 net-zero emissions goal as ambitious. “It’s a long-term ambition, and obviously there is no clear path toward reaching that ambition,” she said, but she pointed to Air Canada’s four-component plan as a roadmap: “The first one is efficiency and operations, [...] the second is new technologies, the third is renewable fuels—including SAF—but also on the ground, [...] and then the fourth is out-of-sector reductions that are available to the industry.”

For Airbus, Kitcher detailed a multi-decade timeline as the right lens for planning and executing change. “If you think about aviation decision-making, 2030 is tomorrow; 2050 is the day after tomorrow. We’re talking 20-plus-year product life cycles,” Kitcher said. “It’s an imperative to be able to think forward to the future to create the conditions for continued success of this industry.”