GA Green Flights

One thing I’ve long wanted is a way to make my personal flying greener. I want to be a strong advocate for stewardship of the environment and the planet we live on, not just the machines that we love to see it from. But it’s always harder to ask others to do their part for the environment if you don’t practice what you preach.

So with that in mind, what I’d love to see is a service that lets you sign up so that when you do a flight, automatically a donation is made through an organization like https://www.cooleffect.org. Of course this is tricky. This is a feature that can only be implemented in an automatic way by a platform that has reliable data about the flights you make. FlightAware has that, especially for ADS-B equipped aircraft.

It also has another really key component in the equation. If I’m making these donations I don’t just want to know I’m a good citizen, I want other people to know! FlightAware is in the unique position of being able to help a green pilot show off a bit, for example by presenting a special icon next to green flights, or by being a bit generous – perhaps by giving green flights some benefits in terms of duration of visibility on the site.

Finally you could make some badge-style widgets that pilots could use on forums and elsewhere, like the dynamically generated images/svgs that software developers trade in on https://shields.io/. It could look like

N12345: 160 green flight hours

or

N12345: 15 green trips

Instructions could help a user set the badge up so that it would link to flightaware.

Why would FlightAware do all this? Because it’d be like a big ad campaign for your site! It would incentivize users to create more links to your site (free SEO), drive more traffic to you, and ultimately get more people to trust you with their payment information, making it more likely that they might ultimately purchase other services offered by FlightAware.

Thoughts?

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That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard of!

But if it works I think I should start a company collecting carbon credits too!

There is a sucker born every minute!