Emissions estimator
Flight emissions for your regular routes
Enter the routes your company flies, the cabin and how often. You get distance and CO2e per trip and per year, worked out the same way the silentVIP portal reports emissions on every flight booking.
Your results will appear here
For each route, enter where it starts and where it goes (an airport code such as JFK, or a city), the cabin, one way or round trip, and how many times a year your company flies it. Add a row for each route you fly regularly.
How this is calculated
The method, step by step
- The great-circle distance between the two airports (the haversine formula, with a mean Earth radius of 6,371 km), from airport coordinates rounded to 0.01°.
- Plus 8% for indirect routing and holding patterns, as the UK government's methodology recommends.
- A flight under 3,700 km (great-circle) is short haul; 3,700 km or more is long haul.
- That distance times the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) 2024 conversion factor for business air travel, per passenger-km, for the haul and cabin. The factors include radiative forcing, the extra warming effect of emissions at altitude.
- A round trip counts the outbound and return flights. The figure per trip is rounded to 0.1 kg, then multiplied by trips a year.
Each row is one nonstop flight each way. For a trip with a connection, add each leg as its own row.
To compare rail with air and plan what to change, read our sustainable business travel guide.
DESNZ 2024 factors used (kg CO2e per passenger-km)
| Cabin | Short haul | Long haul |
|---|---|---|
| Economy | 0.18287 | 0.20011 |
| Premium economy | 0.18287 | 0.32016 |
| Business | 0.2743 | 0.58029 |
| First | 0.2743 | 0.8004 |
For short haul, premium economy uses the economy factor and first uses the business factor.
Limits
- This is an estimate. Actual aircraft, seat layouts, load factors and routes differ from the averages behind the factors.
- It is not a certified carbon footprint, and not a carbon offset calculation.
- It covers flights only, per passenger, between the 118 airports in the list.
In the silentVIP portal
The same estimate on every booking
The silentVIP portal reports a CO2e estimate for each flight booking with a route, using this method and these factors. Totals by department, project and traveler appear in reports and export as CSV.
See emissions reporting in the portal
We'll walk you through the reports in the demo, built from the demo company's data.
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