Increasing captain flight efficiency ¹

At-A-Glance

Current behavior:

Captains make a set of operational decisions that waste fuel.

Desired behavior:

Captains make those same operational decisions in a way that saves fuel.

Change approach:

Captains received monthly feedback on their performance, along with personalized goals and incentives for meeting those goals.

Impact:

Compliance with the fuel-efficient decisions increased by up to 10%.

Implications for implementing partners:

Merely telling actors their behaviors will be tracked can sometimes change them if there are no strong opposing forces; outline very concrete alternate behaviors for actors.

Implications for supporting partners:

Help identify behavior changes that have no strong opposing forces, and where small investments can make a significant difference.

Airplane captains have significant autonomy over a range of decisions that impact fuel economy. Increasing fuel efficiency has obvious environmental and financial benefits.

An experiment with Virgin Atlantic Airlines set to change captain behavior across three time-periods: pre-flight, in-flight, and post-flight. Pilots were given clearly-defined activities to maximize efficiency during each portion of the flight (e.g., adjusting fuel levels based on final cargo load, shutting off engines when taxiing after landing). Pilots were presumed to have no objections to the new behavior, but were accustomed to their prior behavior and lacked knowledge about how and why to implement more efficient behaviors.

Merely telling captains that their behaviors would be monitored, along with providing guidance on best behaviors (but no other incentives) changed behavior significantly.

The effort used several interventions to influence captain behavior across all three periods. First, it informed captains that their activities would be monitored; this factor alone significantly increased efficiency. In addition, it provided captains monthly feedback on their performance the prior month, along with personalized goals for compliance (set as a 25% increase in rate of compliance). Finally, captains received an incentive for meeting their goals, in the form of a donation to the charity of their choice.

The experiment ran eight months and gathered data from over 40,000 flights. Its efforts increased compliance with the efficient behaviors by between 2.5 and 10%, depending on the specific behavior targeted. This translated into significant financial and environmental benefits. After the treatment period ended, compliance decreased, but remained significantly above the original baseline.