Heathrow Airport has partnered with Heston Blumenthal’s The Perfectionist Café to launch The Fly Up, a full English breakfast with a difference.
The Fly Up is cooked with oil which is then recycled into renewable biofuels, including Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). ‘The aim is to increase understanding of SAF, as it plays a key role in hitting Net Zero by 2050,’ states Heathrow, highlighting that a recent survey identified only 14% of travellers as having heard of it.
SAF is an aircraft fuel, almost chemically identity to traditional kerosene-based products, which can be used as a ‘drop-in’ substitute in existing engines (subject to certification). It is currently allowed to be blended with conventional jet fuel at a ratio of up to 50%, and widely accepted as being the optimum solution short-term to help the aviation industry meet its decarbonisation targets.
Used cooking oil is one of several feedstocks employed to create SAF under several different conversion pathways. The new partnership with the onsite café in Terminal 2 will see industry partner Quatra – which has a similar collaboration with over 135,000 customers across the UK – collect the used oil for processing into aeroplane fuel.
Heathrow embarked on an initiative in 2022 to incentivise the use of 155,000 tonnes of SAF at the airport in 2024, cutting the equivalent of 340,000 tonnes of carbon from flights. On November 28 2023, Virgin Atlantic made a milestone world-first transatlantic demonstration flight from Heathrow to New York JFK powered solely by SAF.