From the CEO

AustrAliAns love to travel so our new safety video was the perfect opportunity to pay tribute to our sense of curiosity about the world.

While its main purpose is to convey important safety information, the video features Australians soaking up locations such as Shanghai, Johannesburg, Queenstown and Santiago. Our aim was to capture that great Aussie spirit and willingness to immerse ourselves in diferent cultures.

For Qantas, one of our great joys is flying our customers across the globe and, of course, bringing them home again. But as we carry Australians to their destinations, Qantas is also conscious of the impact of our aircraft on the environment, which is why we’re working hard to reduce our footprint.

We have the world’s largest airline carbon-ofsetting program, called Qantas Future Planet. To date, we’ve ofset more than three million tonnes of carbon dioxide, which equates to taking 1.1 million cars of the road.

We’ve also notched up our first carbon-neutral flights, from Adelaide and Melbourne to Kangaroo Island, through a partnership with the South Australian Government. That means our customers who contribute to the ofsetting program on these flights fly carbon positive, with their credits directed to other carbon-ofsetting projects.

But we’re not content to just ofset emissions; we want to reduce them.

We work with airline manufacturers to make our aircraft lighter and more fuel efficient. On our new Dreamliner, for example, we shaved weight from the seats and even made our crockery lighter by a tenth. When combined, these “one percenters”, as we call them, add up to fuel and emissions savings.

We’re also taking exciting steps in our biofuel program. Last month, we became the first airline to fly an aircraft powered by biofuel between the United States and Australia. One of our Dreamliners flew from Los Angeles to Melbourne powered by mustard seed oil. It’s an industrial type of mustard seed, called carinata, developed by our agtech partner, Agrisoma. The crop is inedible but is extremely tolerant to heat and drought and can be sown in areas where food crops fail.

Currently, we don’t have a locally grown option at the scale we need to power the Qantas fleet. That’s why we’re working with Australian farmers and Agrisoma to achieve our goal of developing an aviation biofuel supply in Australia.

Renewable jet fuel is chemically equivalent to conventional jet fuel and it meets the same technical, performance and safety standards. The only diference is, when we go out to see the world, it will help us to leave a lighter footprint.