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Interviewing Elena Escrivá de Romaní Pérez from FuelVision about how to reduce aviation emissions, reducing CO2 and other emissions by helping pilots optimise their flight behaviours.

the good thing about optimizing and using our product is that you don't only reduce co2 you reduce every emission from burning fuel so we are not a carbon removal technology we reduce everything else what are they or every other substance that we emit while flying

i am absolutely delighted to today to be joined by elena um from fuel vision and uh eleanor i would love to hear more about your story and how you got there and the impact you're um aspiring to have but first of all why don't we just start with uh handing over to you and you can do just a short introduction of who you are and uh what you're what you're up to yeah sure well first of all scott thank you for having me here we've been talking for a while now since the very beginning of your vision so very glad to see that uh we get to to to make it more public now um so yeah my name is elena escriva romani i'm i'm originally from spain and i'm based in copenhagen and i'm a professional airline pilot and i started the journey with fuel vision over a year and a few months ago now excellent so so you've moved from being a pilot to an entrepreneur that's uh that's an interesting move can you tell us more about you know what that journey was how why did you decide that and what took you there yeah sure so already when i was flying i was always wanted to do something else and i got really into the whole sustainability and i got a bit into tech i started to do a few programs on myself by myself just trying to learn to basic programming but it was quite difficult without having a clear goal in mind or something to really build in mind so then the pandemic started and i was laid off as many others my employee went bankrupt here in denmark and i started an ios app development course and started to get more into the whole app development world and then i was lucky enough that i met an ex-colleague also that who used to fly from the same airline and we started talking about this and he pitched me the idea so he released the the father of the idea and we decided to start a company together and how has that been you're moving from that world to an entrepreneur world how is it how are you feeling about that what challenges have you had along the way yeah it's been very difficult but i think it's also that we chose the worst year ever to do all this right so everybody's life was very impacted and we all had a bit of a 360 degree change in our life personally and professionally and then we on top of that decided to embark on onto this so it's been very interesting everything that we have previously read about funding a company in entrepreneurship you see repeated ones once again but it's being a difficult and different challenge and very very motivating and the good thing is that because it's completely related to aviation uh it kept me sane while i was grounded so i stealth i still felt like i was doing something related to my industry and still in touch with it you mentioned that you know you were a bit more in you you were focusing a lot on sustainability and the impact i think it's probably a good idea let's let's talk about you know fuel vision and what is the vision of the impact and you know what why are you doing this of course yeah so what we do at field vision is that we assist airlines to decarbonize reducing the aggregate carbon footprint and the way we do that is the two different tracks so we receive the our clients aircraft data directly from the aircraft so it's the same data that is used for um safety investigations you know like the typical program the mayday most people know about that one so it's a very high quality data compiled by the aircraft while flying and we use that data in two different ways we have the market section where it's a bit more of like a consulting part of our company where we help them with a yeah with how to financially plan and calculate their exposure and hedging programs and then we have the flight efficiency program the flight efficiency what we are doing is we are building a mobile app class cross platform that assists pilots into making more data-driven decisions before the flight and then after the flight they can assess their performance and check their progression and get feedback for the next flight so the idea is to help pilots reduce fuel consumption in your samurai yes exactly so we in 2016 virgin atlantic airways and this is a bit how we kind of started and where the topic started they performed a research with the national bureau of economics i think it was called and it was over over a few months and 40 000 flights they divided the pilot group in different in different groups where they kept the control group and then they had the inform group where they told them they were just going to monitor fuel consumption and then they had an extra group where they allowed them also to set targets to themselves and then you had the last group where on top of being able to set themselves targets they were able to contribute with that savings to the ngo of their preference so they were able to donate their savings basically um and after those eight months i think it was a you could really see how everyone had completely improved on fuel efficiency and how much actually the group that had set targets ironically have done much better than the ones a contributing with the ngo which you would have thought that it would have been a different way right and then after a few months they can see after they finish the research they saw how the complacency kicked in again and then they started to get worse and worse worse always better to the start point from the beginning of their research so we realized how much impact pilots have and we realize what the motivation and engaging pilots and frontline personnel does in fuel efficiency and that is directly linked to emissions and and that's where our whole mission is based on i hadn't quite realized how much the pilot was in control of kind of the variable was during flight that sounds silly when i say it out loud but i i didn't realize that we're changing a behavior in in the pilots you could change consumption is it a big difference that you can have there is a big impact or is it fractions no it is a big impact actually and i'm gonna the other day talking with non-aviation people i i realized that not many people know this part which for me was just automatic and everything made sense so i'm gonna start there but pilots we are the ones who choose how much fuel we want to bring on board of the aircraft so the way that we work is that you have your schedule you have your roster and you go to the office in the morning or in the evening or whatever and you receive an operational flight plan we called and this is tailored by the airline and it specifies the weather conditions the amount of passengers amount of cargo the route and how much fuel do you need but all this is based on some very conservative legal restrictions right and it's not always 100 accurate and the example that i always give is that when we were flying here from copenhagen to berlin for example they would always give us the most conservative departure the most conservative route and the most conservative arrival so i knew by my experience that those 600 kilos extra we didn't burn them every day so the the the aim of our product is not to replace these fly plants neither is to replace pilots what we are building is a tool that a system to make better decisions because that way in the pre-flight flow they can see how much historically everyone else has burned so they know what to expect and therefore they know how to plan for and then another key thing that i realized to be needed to be explained is that the heavier the aircraft is the more fuel you bring on board the more fuel you consume is the same as a car right so that has a already like a huge impact and then there is a lot of things that we can do analogies about us driving right but the amount of the amount that you use your brakes or how do you even change gears or the speed uh the acceleration there is so many uh different ways that flying airplanes can make a lot of impact on the on the direct consumption that's interesting i've actually sat with a friend of mine at the at the front of an air bus as they were um preparing to take off from lax and i've i've been with them as they've gone through all the books and the flight plans and done the safety logs and all of that stuff and i saw how they were kind of looking at the different routes and you know checking the amount of fuel and all of that so i understand kind of that piece that's within the control of the pilot however i hadn't really and it's obvious as you say it now i think that it's you know like driving a car if you slam your foot on the accelerator you're going to burn a lot more fuels and than you need to get yourself going and i guess the same you're saying the same is true when you're flying your style very much in impacts the amount you consume during that flight and that's the obvious level right but then we have another extra layer of non-obvious things that as a pilot you don't have in your power knowledge so you cannot make decisions informed decisions based on and those things are for example leasing so as an airline you might have like 100 aircraft fleet but that doesn't mean that every aircraft has the same type of contract so depending on the contract you might want to fly longer or fly shorter because of the maintenance contracts because of the lease type of contract so that also has an impact on how much fuel you should be burning so it's all kind of like in relation to good like time cost and fuel cost and what is heavier in this part then there is other aircraft that for example they have every aircraft has a few bias and that's like also every car the engines are not exactly the same and if you have one a very new engines then you have a lower view bias so those are things to take into consideration and we don't normally have that kind of information and again um the one of the things of our product is that is is built by pilots for pilots both the co-founders we are pilots and we have flown over yeah over 15 000 hours of flight together and um microfinder also has like a background in cross-country soaring so very into the basics and physics of gliding um but we do not aim to make any pilot think that we are better than them because it is not about that it's about providing a tool that gives you confidence and yeah makes your life easier and your decision making quicker you're looking to be able to reduce consumption reduce co2 emissions um you know i've spoken to to a number of companies that are looking at the future of flight from the ability to beam electricity directly to the plane and power the flight purely by off-board electricity which is currently a kind of scary idea but when he explained it it's like okay i can see how that could work um so there's lots of innovations coming hydrogen as well another one right so why your approach and why now yeah so that's also something where we keep saying to ourselves and to everyone else is that we don't live for tomorrow what we can do today and we believe that real impact starts from today and in the future with sustainable refuels hydrogen any kind of energy resource that you'll use you also need to optimize if you look at the prices of the new type of technologies out there now if we start with stuff for example it's a 300 percent increase of cost which means that airlines are already really struggling nowadays with their operational costs being fueled 25 to 30 of their normal costs so it is something that they will need to optimize no matter what and and kind of diverting a bit of that question but we bring so much more than just optimization because if you keep your personal motivated and engaged and and wanted to have like a positive impact that replicates everywhere else in the in the company right so yeah now that's that's really interesting you know there is a massive surge um for people to find meaning and purpose in their work i think we all see that at the moment there was a big headline that came up on my phone yesterday about that what is uh meaningful work and how do you find it so um you know there's there's definitely there's definitely that which i think uh yeah i hear you say that as well as the optimization it's helping to keep um staff engaged and again we're in that what they call the great resignation so keeping staff engaged is is critical um so you in but in terms of the optimization thing and reducing that impact uh uh having that impact reducing the carbon dioxide what you know how much of an impact do you think you can have on one plane or 100 planes there is also a very interesting thing that when i talk to these say very positive people about 2030 and the technologies out there right that they keep forgetting and is that sustainable air fuels for example there has been scientific research on paper saying that they increase radiation significantly and they increase knox as well significantly so i sometimes i feel like that meme of like the water tank and just like smashing that plaster on top of the of the leak um we we don't see the consequences of those things and the the good thing about optimizing and using our product is that you don't only reduce co2 you reduce every emission from burning fuel so we are not a cargo removal technology we reduce everything else water vapor every other substance that we emit while flying and in terms of impact i can tell you about our proof of concept so we started with um with a small airline here in denmark that were operating in vietnam uh they were like a new fleet a new pilot fleet into that aircraft so for that we give them a bit of slack that they will have to adapt to the place and to the aircraft but we proved that 14 uh with two aircraft so in terms of numbers that is 150 tons of fuel per month which is 300 tons of co2 with two aircraft so i'm not saying that it would be that potential with every airline because of course it depends very much on the roots and of the experience of the pilots and yeah of the aircraft type but i think it is a very significant impact yeah so you talk proof of concept where are you now and what what comes next yes so we started our development we so we started with the proof of concept with this airline over a year ago then we developed an mvp and we tested it with them and we saw an increase of fuel efficiency techniques on the ground of uh 50 on the first month and then of the overall of 91 increase of techniques so we saw that and we decided that the mvp was too limited then so we started development in august and we are now planning to launch the version one of the app in the beginning of spring does the app cover um commercial and freight as well is it any airline yes exactly and that has been a quite of a topic recently we saw now with the pandemic how the arthritis has demand has increased so much and we know for a fact and people inside of of that side of the sector that they have a massive problem with over consumption and the reason why is because right now the big logistic companies and retail companies they hire charter aviation charter companies and the only metric they have is on-time performance so there has been cases of aircrafts holding over for hours on top of an airport because of bad weather but the big logistics company wanted them to land no matter what so we're talking about a very very big margin in that side of the industry i'm not sure how many airline groups i have in my network but if there's any out there that want to get in touch with you i'm sure sure they'll find a way what's the best way to get hold of me and find out more yes of course so you can find us in the our linkedin page uh few vision oh yeah the future.oh i believe i will i will leave it in a link and i'll put the links in down here perfect that's fine um and through our website as well or through me directly or through my co-founders on western also on linkedin um yeah and in our website there is a contact form as well with our email so anywhere we are very keen to to talk to everyone and and discuss the the problems that the industry is having at the moment and how can we help them to put a solution no that's brilliant and i and i joked um about um airline groups but there are a number of greener travel companies that i'm in interacting with and i'm sure this would be very interesting for them to maybe talk with you about to cover but maybe also integrate into their offerings and their practices as well so i'm hoping they'll pick up on this and if they don't i'll reach out to them directly but with that before we wrap up is there anything that i've missed anything that you want to tell us that we haven't um covered already yeah it may be just saying that kind of following what you just mentioned uh we do believe that at some point electrification will have a good improvement and everything else and in this type of part of that technologies and almost that every airline will need sort of a sustainable certification in order to fly so we can see how our competitor landscape has increased a lot for the last year so the market is there and it's just jumping into it yesterday already good well i hope you i mean i hope you can really have a big impact on on the market today because you know that's what we say we we can't slow things down fast enough right now so the more people we have coming at different angles the better it is so i really wish you the best of luck with all of this um and with that i just want to say thank you ever so much for sharing his story and telling us more about what you do and uh to everybody who's watching please do like share subscribe and tell everybody about this it's uh very interesting thank you ever so much eleanor thank you so much