International Airlines Group is deploying OpenAirlines' SkyBreathe fuel-efficiency platform across more than 600 aircraft operated by Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Level and Vueling, in a move the group ties directly to fuel price volatility and geopolitical pressure on operating costs.

The software is already live at Aer Lingus, Iberia, Level and Vueling. British Airways will complete its deployment in the coming months, closing out the group-wide rollout.

SkyBreathe uses artificial intelligence to synthesise data from flight plans, weather forecasts and aircraft performance metrics, pinpointing specific fuel-saving opportunities while maintaining safety standards, according to IAG. OpenAirlines claims the system can reduce fuel consumption by up to 5% — a manufacturer figure that, applied across a fleet of IAG's scale, would translate into material annual savings if realised in line with results the vendor reports elsewhere.

OpenAirlines says its platform community saved roughly 714 million kg of fuel in 2025, equivalent to about $600 million in avoided cost and 2.2 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. Those numbers cover the vendor's entire customer base, not IAG specifically, and provide the benchmark against which the group's own results will be measured.

Consolidating fragmented practice

IAG carriers already operate a range of fuel-saving measures: optimised flight paths, reduced auxiliary power unit usage on the ground and reduced-engine taxiing. Until now, each carrier monitored these practices through disparate systems, which limited the group's ability to compare performance or transfer lessons between airlines.

SkyBreathe replaces that patchwork with a single data and reporting framework across all five carriers. The practical consequence is benchmarking: IAG can now measure fuel performance on a consistent basis across Aer Lingus, British Airways, Iberia, Level and Vueling, and push operational best practices horizontally through the group rather than airline by airline.

"Fuel is one of the largest costs for our airlines, and ongoing fuel price volatility has reinforced the importance of improving efficiency wherever we can," says IAG chief financial and sustainability officer Jose Antonio Barrionuevo. "Having access to deeper operational insight will help identify savings more quickly and reduce unnecessary fuel burn."

Barrionuevo's dual title — finance and sustainability — reflects why the programme serves two ledgers at once. Every kilogram of fuel saved cuts both cost and CO2, and IAG is framing the deployment in both terms as European carriers face tightening emissions reporting obligations and investor scrutiny.

Alexandre Feray, founder and chief executive of OpenAirlines, says the platform is engineered to support the scale of major airline groups, enabling carriers to align around a single methodology. IAG is the test of that claim: a five-carrier group spanning full-service and low-cost models, widebody and narrowbody fleets, and separate operating certificates.

What is flying, what is promised

The deployment status is concrete. Four of the five carriers run the system today; British Airways, the group's largest operator, is the remaining gap, with completion expected within months rather than years.

What remains unproven is the quantum of savings IAG will actually capture. The up-to-5% consumption reduction is OpenAirlines' headline figure, and the vendor's 2025 community-wide results — 714 million kg of fuel, $600 million, 2.2 million tonnes of CO2 — aggregate outcomes across airlines of very different sizes and maturity in fuel-efficiency practice. IAG has not published a group-specific savings target.

The commercial logic is nonetheless straightforward. Fuel sits among the largest single cost lines for every IAG carrier, and volatility rather than absolute price levels is what drives decisions like this one: efficiency programmes convert an uncontrollable input cost into a partially controllable one. A unified platform also shortens the interval between identifying a saving and implementing it across 600-plus airframes.

With British Airways' integration due to finish in the coming months, the first full-year, group-wide dataset under SkyBreathe will establish whether IAG's returns track the vendor's claimed benchmarks.