Posted by bessie on Thursday, January 14, 2010.

Fly green, for real

In a recent post on Fast Company, we ranked the major US airlines by climate impact per passenger.

We started with data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics’ T-100 database, a collection of monthly reports from every airline that is certified to fly in the US. We took factors like flight distance, aircraft model, number of passengers, and amount of freight carried, combined them with aircraft fuel use equations from the European Environment Agency, and ran the lot through our emissions engine. (Fun fact: the calculations took about 15 minutes on a standard household computer.)

This chart shows the complete ranking, from best to worst in pounds of CO2e per passenger-mile.

airline_chart

Note: a passenger-mile is one passenger flying one mile.

-Ian

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