KLM operates first flight on biofuels to New York

After a series of flights between Schiphol and Paris, Dutch airlines KLM operated its first transatlantic flight on used cooking oil to New York on Friday. The flight between Amsterdam and New York is scheduled to fly every Thursday in the coming 25 weeks. The Dutch company began to test flights using biofuels in 2009. KLM started with 200 flights between Amsterdam and Paris. Last year, KLM operated its first intercontinental flight on used cooking oil to Rio de Janeiro. The aviation industry, policy-makers and producers of agrarian commodities view agrofuels as the solution to growth of the sector. They plan to use about two million tonnes of bio-kerosene per year by 2020 in Europe, compared to almost none now. This means that about three percent of all the kerosene in Europe could be bio-kerosene by 2020. "Our ambition is to fly with 1 percent of bio-kerosene by 2015," KLM corporate director Camiel Eurlings told Xinhua. "That may seem like nothing at all, but I can tell you that this a big step within the world of the aviation industry." Many Dutch corporations linked their name to the KLM biofuels project by offering to pay a percentage of the flight tickets for their clients.