A WORD FROM BENJAMIN SMITH
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At Air France-KLM, we share a common pride in bringing people together, enabling them to discover new places and cultures, ensuring the sustainability of our economic exchanges, to facilitate access to health when necessary or more simply to reunite families, and therefore fulfilling one of humankind’s oldest dreams on a daily basis.
" As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it. "
Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Today, if we want to preserve and continue to share this dream, we must respond to the challenges of our century with the enthusiasm, creativity and pioneering spirit that have always characterized us here at Air France-KLM.
The role of the Air France-KLM Group is to analyse the changes in our customers’ behaviour and provide a more enlightened and resonant travel experience, with more intelligent use of aircraft, an integral part of a better-interconnected transport network.
Our responsibility is to accelerate our environmental transition and ensure our place as frontrunner in a more sustainable aviation industry. Throughout the year, we have continued to work on our trajectory to decarbonise all our activities. We have formalized our action plan through ‘Destination Sustainability’. Our ambition rely on two main pillars, the environment and people & culture.
By 2030, we are committed to reducing our CO2 emissions per passenger-km by 30%, compared to their 2019 levels. We have also committed to using at least 10% sustainable aviation fuel by 2030, well above the 6% requirement on departing European flights. To meet these targets, we are active on all fronts : accelerating the renewal of our fleet to reach 64% of new generation aircraft by 2028 (these new aircraft offer 20 to 25% reduction in CO2 emissions and their noise footprint is 34% lower), signing contracts and memorandums of understanding with several partners for the supply of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (Neste, DG Fuels and TotalEnergies) and the development of the SAF sector in Europe, facilitating and developing intermodality with the digitization of the customer journey, etc. All these initiatives contribute to charting our decarbonization trajectory, with the objective of reaching Net Zero in 2050.
We are also committed to our social responsibilities, the second pillar of our ambition. Diversity and gender equality are one of our group’s main priorities. Air France-KLM is committed to having 40% of the Group’s Executive Committee and the senior management positions held by women by 2030.
Finally, our corporate purpose reflects the missions and values that our 73,000 employees have embodied for decades: “At the forefront of a more responsible European aviation, we unite people for the world of tomorrow”. This corporate purpose is an impetus for profound transformation for all our employees, our customers, our shareholders, our service providers and all our partners.
Our responsibility is historic, and we must assume it before the men and women who put their trust in us. This is a systemic change and Air France-KLM is committed to a fair environmental transition, at the heart of a new sustainable and inclusive aviation.
My dearest wish is for the transformation of our sector to enable future generations to continue to board flights and feel the fascination and pride that have accompanied the history of aviation.