For today’s airlines, fuel efficiency remains an ongoing challenge. While the early to mid-2000s brought new pilot procedures, better tankering, and fuel monitoring that delivered major savings, progress has since stalled: performance has plateaued at many airlines, with smaller, more complex targets that are harder to achieve.
The current lack of progress usually stems from several factors. For example, many airlines treat every initiative equally, spreading resources too thin instead of concentrating them where they matter most. In other cases, initiatives launch without follow-through, and procedures quietly revert to workflows that don't generate savings. Many airlines also lack a governance structure that weighs safety, schedule, and commercial priorities within the context of a fuel efficiency initiative, which undermines the overall value of the work.
The remaining two factors compound the first three. Having already captured the most accessible savings, airlines find that new initiatives take more effort per unit gained, a natural consequence of diminishing returns. And without rigorous measurement, fuel management teams can lose confidence in whether real improvement is happening at all, since a sliding baseline makes it hard to distinguish genuine improvement from baseline drift.
For today's airlines, improving fuel efficiency takes organizational commitment and clear prioritization, not just goodwill from the fuel team. The IATA Fuel Efficiency Manual and Implementation Guidelines (FEMIG) offer a proven four-pillar framework for building a reliable, scalable program. The framework includes:
For airlines, easy fuel savings may be behind us, but fuel-efficiency improvement is not. The challenge has shifted from identifying opportunities to understanding which ones matter most and building the organizational capability to capture them consistently. Having worked with over 200 airlines, IATA offers a clear, structured approach to help your airline build a resilient, effective program, one backed by a system that supports every tactic rather than a rotating list of one-off initiatives.
To find out how IATA can help improve your fuel efficiency program:
