Alex Durand has been CEO of Norwich, England-based SaxonAir, a charter, aircraft-management, Fixed-Base Operator (FBO), maintenance and hangarage provider, since the start of 2013, and is in his fifth year as vice chair of the British Business and General Aviation Association.
He has helped position SaxonAir—and Norwich Airport—at the vanguard of the UK business aviation’s drive toward more sustainable operations and has advocated for the sector during the post-Brexit and post-pandemic recoveries.
SaxonAir’s sustainability drive includes getting an electric aircraft onto the company’s AOC (Air Operator Certificate), working with East Anglian-based non-profit Nuncats to develop an electric kit aircraft and running summer schools for aspiring aerospace technicians, and
holding public events at Norwich that have brought aviation businesses and nature/conservation NGOs(Non-government Organizations)
together to discuss decarbonization. On Friday, June 23, the airport will host an event to raise the profile of sustainable aviation fuels (SAF) and promote the fact that it is now available at Norwich.
Q: During EBACE, Norwich Airport’s owners, Regional & City Airports, announced that it now has SAF available on an ongoing basis. How did that happen, and what role did SaxonAir play?
A: It started at the BBGA’s (the British Business & General Aviation Association’s) annual conference. I talked to AirBP about what were the blockages to getting SAF more readily available, then went back and talked to Norwich Airport about where they were. I don’t want to take away their credit—they had plans anyway, and as a group, they were committed. But I think our involvement gave it an acceleration; our commitment encouraged them that there was a need to do it.
It probably took the thick end of a year. AirBP had issues getting their UK supply sufficiently mobilized to be able to deliver it to another airport. Having it produced in the UK is important, because the more transport there is, the less the benefit, so I think BP wanted to make sure
they could reliably do that.
It’s quite complicated for an airport—they have a group of different users. Norwich has got airlines, it’s got offshore [helicopter operators], it’s got GA, commercial business aviation. What would suit us as a business-aviation operator isn’t necessarily suited for the airlines, so there’s questions about blend. Do you take a bowser? Do you do a drop-in? They had a lot of issues, and then had to look at how that fits their other portfolio of airports. And then a common question is, will anyone guarantee the uptake if we go to all this trouble? So, we said we would, although we’re a very, very small user at Norwich Airport.
Credit to all involved, because they’re doing it voluntarily. But it shouldn’t take that long, when apparently this [SAF] is the quickest route to a sharp reduction in emissions. I believe this is only the fourth location [in the UK] that has a volume of SAF readily available. That’s hardly enough to really transform the industry.
Q: The UK government is developing a SAF mandate. What would you like to see in that?
A: You can say, ‘Yes, people [using business aviation] can afford it,’ but it’s a battered industry recovering from COVID and Brexit, it’s not something [operators] can easily absorb. If we want to see an uplift quickly, then a subsidy of some kind—a tax reduction or some incentive for a while—would seem to be the way to work.
Within the BBGA, and with colleagues for me at the moment, the dialogue is now more about, ‘Let’s not wait. If we haven’t got a definitive answer, let’s assume we have nothing, so what can we do to take it further?’ The thing we did is absorb the price differential. At Norwich
Airport, the posted price of SAF is approximately 50% more [than JetA1]. A lot of people wouldn’t thank me for that, but we’ve done it. So far, we seem to have been able to absorb it, which has actually changed my thinking as well. If we are front-footed about it as an industry and say, ‘Yep, it’s significant, but we’re taking that cost to meet our responsibilities,’ surely we’re doing a much better PR job than waiting for somebody
to help us. You can see the headlines: ‘Business aviation gets a helping hand from government.’
Q: What other things can you do that will make a substantial difference?
A: We’re in the very early stages of having an airport user group to talk to each other about these challenges. We have a nice range at Norwich. Other users might say: ‘Well, it’s easy for you—but can an air-ambulance do it? What about the offshore Helicopters?’ If we share our thinking and our experiences, hopefully it’ll start to develop a bit of momentum. I think if airports convened SAF user groups, you’d start to see more uptake. And at Norwich, we’re doing a SAF day, where everybody takes SAF if they can, just to see how many people could, how many couldn’t, see what the difference in emissions is for one day, and start to showcase that.

Q: After climate activists briefly disrupted the BBGA conference in London, the association sat down with them and invited them to take
part in ongoing discussions. The response from EBAA and NBAA to the disruption at EBACE focused on the protesters’ irresponsibility and
described their actions as unacceptable. Is the industry responding to these concerns in the right way?
A: I sympathize with both responses. It is extremely frustrating as an industry to be incorrectly understood, incorrectly presented, to the point where [the sector is perceived] almost as an existential threat. There’s a defensiveness you can understand. But with my BBGA hat on, what was really nice is we all felt the same way. We were considering what would happen if we said we want to engage. And that is the approach I’ve taken at SaxonAir. If we open up first, we describe it, we share why we should exist, what our difficulties are and what we’re doing about it, we then start a discussion—whereas without that, everybody’s just firing bullets. It may be that you’ll have a meeting and not agree—but at the moment, there’s no dialogue.
I appreciate the passion behind the protest, but it’s definitely not fully educated about the subject because there’s just glaring inaccuracies. But if you have a dialogue, you can openly disagree. We might learn things we don’t know; we might realize there’s things we thought were okay and aren’t. It’s the most complicated, important [challenge] of our times, yet the debate is being conducted at a playground level, and that’s a
problem.
To go back to my SaxonAir hat, and I may regret this: but on a local level, by going out and talking about it first, I’ve only had positive feedback and people who’ve said, ‘Wow, your industry’s difficult. If you can make those steps, then it’s much easier for me in a simpler sector.’ Surely that isn’t a coincidence.
Q: It’s strange, in a way, that we haven’t seen more people in the sector adopt a similar approach. What do you think?
A: It just doesn’t seem to exist. We had to do the outreach and were really pleasantly surprised. There are some in [the activist] space that still won’t engage, but because we’re genuine, they took us at face value. What we’re not doing right is we’re talking amongst ourselves a lot, and we’re not going mainstream. I think we have to bite the bullet. It’s not working by hiding. We’ve got to look people in the eye and explain the facts.
It’s really hard. From a BBGA point of view, we’re struggling to identify ourselves as a sector against the airlines. As soon as you say ‘commercial business aviation,’ that’s fat cats in jets. Can we just stop trying to turn it into a cartoon and recognize it is important? One of the ones which is particularly irksome is when people talk about Premier League teams flying [on a private jet] to a football match, but nobody’s talking about the football match and 60,000 people’s carbon footprint getting to a stadium. Relate it to that, and we’ve got a conversation.
Q: And yet, so much of the public image of business aviation—even in companies’ own advertising—highlights the luxury leisure travel
concept. The industry doesn’t seem to want to promote the ‘time-saving business tool’ use case that operators constantly try to highlight.
A: The trade associations have encouraged people not to use that kind of imagery, but I think if I’m being objective, they’re marketing aspirations. That’s not the actual user. It’s a marketing tool. I would say it’s probably more sensible to avoid that in the current climate. But why
shouldn’t you? I’m sure if you were to promote an airline service, you’d show it looks very nice and you’re well very looked after on board. But I think it doesn’t resonate well at the moment. It doesn’t help. It’s very clichéd, worn imagery, but I guess it gets the biggest recognition.
Q: Are we perhaps at a point where business aviation entities can advertise their sustainability efforts as the main selling point?
A: Well, if you take SaxonAir as a case study, yes. We’ve been doing this I think a good five years now. Yeah, we’ll be immediately accused of greenwashing, but it shouldn’t matter. We should have confidence that we can argue the case. If you look at emissions now compared to where they were even 10 years ago, they’re significantly less. That must be ahead of an awful lot of other sectors—it’s certainly ahead of road transport, and it’s certainly ahead of maritime. I think we should just go all in, really. It’s not doing us any favors not doing that. Let’s just tell the truth, and stand up for it.