AACO signs up with SITA to meet EU emissions challenge

AACO and SITA announced the news yesterday at the Air Transport IT Summit in Cannes yesterday

AACO also agreed on behalf of its  members (EgyptAir, Oman Air, Royal Jordanian, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Syrian Arab Airways, Air Cairo, Jordan Aviation, Kuwait Airways, Libyan Airlines, Middle East Airlines and Yemenia Yemen Airways) that SITA will supply advisory services to help manage what they call the EU emissions trading scheme "challenge."

SITA has developed and tested a scaleable global solution to comply with Emissions Trading Schemes (ETS) for an airline industry burdened with multiple such demands.

Four airlines from the Middle East, the United States and Europe are testing SITA's Aircraft Emissions Manager, the world's first Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) software tool to measure accurately carbon emissions from aircraft operators. One test has been completed satisfactorily, and three more are getting underway, as airlines finalize their plans for monitoring and reporting carbon dioxide emissions to the EU in order to meet the deadline of 31-Aug-2009. By then all airlines operating to, from and within the EU must submit their plan on how they will monitor and report carbon dioxide emissions to their assigned EU member state in advance of a pre-monitoring phase in 2010. The effective cap-and-trade starts in 2012.

"SITA is already providing our members with consultancy services to prepare their monitoring plans, " AACO Secretary General Abdul Wahab Teffaha said. "The EU ETS is a very aggressive plan for airlines that never had to do something like this before," AACO is the first to endorse the solution
“ We are satisfied that the SITA solution will allow our member airlines to provide 100% accurate data on our carbon emissions to the EU so we get a fair deal under the ETS from 2012 onwards.“ he said

Francesco Violante, SITA CEO, said: "SITA is already a trusted neutral interface between national authorities and airlines for the secure and efficient exchange of data over the world's largest private network. We recognize that there is a need for a community approach to accurate reporting of carbon emissions and we have now developed a solution that is suitable for deployment in any region.

“We are pleased to see the Arab Air Carriers Organization taking the lead on implementation and we are confident that others will follow."