Events
From Fuel Data to Fuel Intelligence: i6 Group at WAF 2026
i6 Group
i6 is a Silver sponsor of the World Aviation Festival 2026, at FIL in Lisbon from 13 to 15 October. From a white paper on why fuel digitization is the future to talking turnaround time with Ryanair, here’s where you’ll find us at WAF.
The Future of Fuelling: Lower costs, fewer errors, and total transparency maps where value leaks out of the aviation fuel supply chain and what changes when the whole chain sits on a single record. It draws on anonymised data from i6 deployments across fuel farms, into-plane operations and airlines, and covers what SAF mandates will require of fuel reporting.
Published through the World Aviation Festival blog.
14 October 2026, 16:00. Alex Mattos, CEO of i6 Group, joins Steven Fitzgerald, Director of Sustainability and Finance at Ryanair.
Ryanair runs around 3,600 flights a day across 225 airports, all engineered around a single number: 25 minutes, blocks on to blocks off. Fuel was the last part of that turn still running on a paper docket carried around the aircraft. The session covers why Ryanair prioritised digital fueling, how digital pilot-to-refueler communication changes the process, what six months of rollout has shown about efficiency and visibility, and what other airlines can take from the experience.
More than 30,000 Ryanair flights a month now run through digital sign-offs with i6, saving around 5 to 10 minutes per flight. Some Ryanair pilots now place their fuel order before they have left the house.
"Using i6 allows us to get the doors closed, allows the flight crew to communicate and accept the fuel figures at an earlier stage than ever before, and it keeps our operations on track. The feedback from pilots has been universally positive." – Steven Fitzgerald, Director of Sustainability and Finance, Ryanair
14 October 2026, 16:35. Alex Mattos joins Jonathan Hankin, Head of ESG at Menzies Aviation, David Buckley, Flight Operations Manager for Efficiencies and Sustainability at easyJet, and Robin Weissgerber, Product Manager at Information Design. Patrick Edmond, Chief Commercial Officer at Future Energy Global, moderates.
The panel covers where disconnected fueling and turnaround workflows still create delays and fuel waste, what operational gains airlines are seeing from digital fueling, how operators balance efficiency, resilience and sustainability targets, and why so many operational sustainability projects fail to scale.
Fuel remains one of aviation's largest costs and one of its least digitized processes, two decades after booking, turnaround, maintenance and loyalty moved to real-time data.
Fuel passes through many hands: refinery, storage, logistics, into-plane operator, airline. Each keeps its own record, in its own format, on its own timeline, and most of it is still captured by hand. Every manual handoff is another opportunity for loss, error and delay.
When everyone works from the same real-time record instead, fuel decisions get made earlier in the turnaround. Flight crews accept figures sooner. Pre-fueling is handled before the aircraft arrives. Doors close on time.
At Menzies Aviation, real-time data and better truck allocation cut fueling delays by 47%. At North Air in Manchester, fueling delays fell by 92%. At London Heathrow, digitizing British Airways' refueling improved optimization by more than 50% and saved around 2,000 tonnes of fuel and roughly 6,000 tonnes of CO2. At EPPCO, the largest into-plane operator at Dubai International, digital data capture removed invoicing errors entirely.
At the fuel farm, digitization turns reconciliation from a monthly cleanup into real-time control. Across i6 deployments, reconciliation efficiency and inventory accuracy each rise by around 90%, inventory errors fall by around 90%, and the resources needed to run the farm drop by roughly half.
Delay carries a hard price. EUROCONTROL puts the network average cost of delay to an airline at around €100 per minute, which is where the minutes recovered in the turn show up on the balance sheet.
Growing sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) requirements make the case sharper. Proving what was delivered, uplifted and used is difficult when the evidence sits across separate systems and individual pieces of paper. The EU's ReFuelEU Aviation regulation requires SAF to reach 2% of fuel supplied at EU airports in 2025, 6% in 2030 and 70% by 2050, with a synthetic aviation fuel sub-mandate of 1.2% from 2030.
Because i6 already connects the physical fuel, the blend, the certificate and the aircraft record in one place, accurate SAF reporting is already built into the operation.
i6 has a private meeting room at FIL for all three days, and the diary fills up quickly.
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i6 Group is an aviation fuel management technology company. The i6 platform connects the entire aviation fuel supply chain, refinery to wing-tip, so that fuel suppliers, fuel farms, into-plane operators, and airlines all work from the same real-time record. i6 is the only company spanning all four in a single platform. The technology is in daily use at more than 300 airports worldwide, backed by 24/7 expert support. Since inception, i6 has processed almost 300 billion liters of fuel with 99.9% up time.
