Heathrow yesterday published the latest quarterly instalment of its Booker Fiction Prize submission aka the "Fly Quiet and Green" results:
Fly Quiet & Green League Table Q1 2018
If anything, this quarter's FQ&G results are even murkier than usual.
While the basic proposition isn't rocket science -
identify LHR's 50 busiest airlines (by number of movements) during the quarter in question, compare their performance on seven environmental metrics and combine their scores in a league table - Heathrow manages to fail at each stage of the process.
For a start, Vueling (daily LCG plus 1-2 daily BCN in Q1) is conspicuously absent from the results but Korean (one daily ICN plus the odd 777F) gets included. Likewise JAL (2 daily HND) is omitted, but PIA and Kuwait (both 10 pw) are in the league table. Go figure.
When it comes to calculating the league table rankings, Heathrow has already acknowledged that it massages the results to favour whichever airline is flavour of the month, so it should come as no surprise that SAS, this time around, gets propelled from its rightful Number 3 slot to the top of the table. Other airlines that have been awarded unjustified hikes up the table include Lufthansa and and Austrian (both 10 places higher than their performance merits), while heading in the other direction China Southern has clearly offended Heathrow and gets an unjustified 11-place demotion.
Aer Lingus, which actually comes out top based on its performance, get unfairly relegated to third place which oddly it shares with Etihad, whose performance only merits 7th position.
On average, every airline gets awarded an extra 235 points (nearly 25% of the available 1000-point maximum) over and above the score that its environmental performance actually qualifies for. That's one way of making your operators look greener, I suppose.
In a final twist, for each metric Heathrow awards airlines a Red, Amber or Green "RAG" classification based on the performance bands set for that indicator. So, for example, BA Longhaul gets a Red for being 38th out of the 50 airlines for violations of the late-night movements quota. Virgin Atlantic, Qantas, El Al and EgyptAir, are all lower-placed (worse) than BA for the night flights metric, but inexplicably only get an Amber for it.
You couldn't make this stuff up, though somebody clearly has.