Bosses from two long-time rival airlines have called a truce to further the aviation industry’s plans to decarbonise.

Sitting on a panel at the recent Sustainable Skies summit, Virgin Atlantic’s CEO Shai Weiss alongside BA’s Sean Doyle called for ‘radical collaboration’ between airlines, governments, oil companies and others in the industry in order to seriously reduce emissions.

The CEOs were joined onstage by the chief sustainability officers from Airbus and Boeing.

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Describing how the airlines had shared data regarding SAF use and efficiency, Weiss said: “The real findings that we share with the world are what we call ‘radical collaboration’ and open source,” he said.

“We always said that sustainability is bigger than any one of us on this panel. Any progress that anyone of us should make, we believe that it should be shared for the advancement of our industry”.

Wiess furthered that the goal was to clean up aviation to the point that consumers didn’t need ‘to make a choice between flying or being green”.

After the event, Wiess said: “It’s not often that you see two sets of competitors going toe to toe on stage, but today was unusual.

“We agreed that radical collaboration is required for our industry to reach Net Zero by 2050 with a focus on the near-term, including fleet modernisation, wide adoption of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF), as well as longer term technological innovation including Hydrogen and electrification”.