In Conversation: Jeremy Bowen, Cirium

March 23, 2023

In this week’s episode of our ‘Sustainability in the Air’ podcast, Cirium’s CEO Jeremy Bowen speaks with SimpliFlying CEO Shashank Nigam and shares how the company is empowering the industry to reach a more sustainable future with the most accurate aircraft emissions data.

You can listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podcast Addict and Google podcasts.

How data can help drive better sustainability benchmarks and targets

Here’s a preview of the episode below. You can also read a deep dive to learn about Cirium’s complex data set underlying the emissions calculator; how they ensure their data is transparent, independent of bias and validated; and why the future of corporate travel may include carbon budgets.

The future: Budgeting for carbon

Cirium focuses on presenting transparent, impartial and accurate data to decision makers. “Our job is not to recommend to airlines how to layout their cabins. It’s to report on the facts”, asserts Bowen. “If we know that for an airline a business class seat is less fuel efficient, or less carbon efficient, then our job is to report it.”

Bowen says that what’s important is that passengers are increasingly interested in this data. Soon, their travel decisions and choices might be based on the carbon efficiency of their trips. This, ultimately, could persuade airlines to think about how they configure their cabins or plan their fleet renewal programmes.

A sustainable future, according to Bowen, will require carbon budgeting — specifically in the corporate sector. Just as corporations have traditionally managed travel budgets, they are likely to start considering strict carbon budgets as well.

“So when they’re booking online, they can go right, well, I can fly that business class seat, or I can trade down because I’m running out my carbon budget”, explains Bowen.

Our Take

As the perils of climate change are fast becoming a reality, the transition to net zero has never been this urgent. Aviation remains an industry that is difficult to decarbonise. With few options at its disposal and very little time to implement them, every sustainability transition must be planned with due care and diligence.

Data analytics can be particularly helpful in informing these decisions and enabling a greener future, especially for benchmarking and setting baselines. Large datasets, however, can often suffer from a lack of quality data. A 2017 study involving 75 executives found that data quality is far worse than most companies’ estimates — only ~3% of the data quality scores were deemed acceptable.

Data quality refers to the degree to which data or dataset records are complete, consistent, reliable and context-based. Considering the sheer volume of data, it is extremely difficult to maintain its quality and integrity in a timely way.

This is where Cirium’s data products can make a difference. The company leverages hundreds of data sources that are then put through automated processes to catch and isolate unexpected null data, improperly formatted data and other outlier data. Each anomaly is flagged, reviewed and corrected.

Moreover, as Bowen mentions, Cirium has the largest and most comprehensive fleet database in the world. It details nearly 170 different fuel burn models, based on engine type, aircraft and winglets. In addition, the company also helps airlines and data suppliers spot data integrity issues.

As Bowen rightly says: “As the industry starts to get measured effectively – and then fined or rewarded based on it, the accuracy of the data will be the most important [parameter].”

You can listen and subscribe to the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podcast Addict and Google podcasts. Or, read the full deep dive here.

Our Sustainability in the Air podcast is powered by SimpliFlying which has been helping build trust in travel for over a decade.

Season 3 is brought to you by our sustainability partners, Cirium and CarbonClick.