Regional Updates

Asia Pacific Initiative to Reduce Emissions (ASPIRE) 

ASPIRE was formed in February 2008 by Air Services Australia, Airways New Zealand and the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). Membership has since been expanded to include the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore, Japan's Civil Aviation Bureau and Aerothai of Thailand who joined earlier this year. Its aim is to develop gate-to-gate operational procedures which reduce fuel burn and emissions for all phases of flight on key Asian and Pacific routes.

IATA has supported the ASPIRE initiative since its inception along with member airlines from each of the states involved. The initiative is completely in alignment with IATA’s environmental program with a key objective of “normalizing” the availability of these efficiencies. As part of this program, ASPIRE Daily was introduced earlier this year to measure the availability of the following initiatives on specified routes on a daily basis:

• User preferred routes
• Dynamic airborne route planning
• Required navigation performance
• Time based arrivals management
• Arrivals optimization
• Departure optimization
• Surface movement optimization

Routes will be assigned a star rating to measure the availability of the specified efficiencies, with three stars indicating that the minimum number of best-practice procedures is available and five stars meaning that all procedures are available.

The first ASPIRE Daily city pair commenced on 21 February 2011 with Auckland to San Francisco and the second commenced 15 May 2011 with Los Angeles to Singapore. Further routes involving the participating states will be introduced during the year.

www.aspire-green.com