The question Air Cargo Week poses this month is blunt enough to make Brussels uncomfortable: is the ReFuelEU Aviation mandate finally working? It is a fair question, and the honest answer is that the evidence remains thin — because the regulation's own reporting machinery has not yet produced the data that would settle it.

What does ReFuelEU actually require?

The regulation obliges fuel suppliers at EU airports to blend sustainable aviation fuel into the jet fuel pool, with an obligation that started at 2% in 2025 and steps up on a fixed schedule through 2030 and beyond. Airlines, in turn, must uplift those blends whether or not they want them. The policy is the EU's flagship instrument for decarbonising aviation, and the freight sector watches it closely — cargo operators burn fuel on the same airport aprons as passenger carriers and pay the same blended-fuel premiums.

Why the verdict is still out

The difficulty is measurement. A mandate can be working in the legal sense — suppliers complying, blends uplifted, paperwork filed — and still be failing in the industrial sense, if the underlying SAF volumes are scarce, expensive, and concentrated in a handful of hub airports. Both things can be true at once.

That distinction matters for three groups:

• Airlines and integrators, who absorb the cost delta between conventional jet fuel and SAF, often a multiple of the kerosene price per tonne.
• Fuel suppliers, who must decide whether to build blending and logistics capacity ahead of the escalating targets or buy compliance volumes at a premium.
• Freight forwarders and shippers, for whom fuel surcharges transmit SAF costs down the chain.

What would 'working' look like?

A mandate earns its keep when it pulls supply into existence rather than merely rationing it. The test is not the compliance rate on paper — that will approach 100% because the penalties leave little choice — but whether new production capacity, new feedstock streams and new delivery routes show up in the fuel tenders that airlines and cargo operators actually sign.

Until those volumes land at airports in verified tonnages, claims of success deserve the same scepticism applied to any manufacturer's performance promise: measured against the delivery record, not the press release. The escalating percentage steps built into the regulation were designed to give producers time to scale. Whether that scale-up has begun in earnest is precisely what the industry is now asking.

What comes next

The next tranche of compliance data and capacity announcements will do more to answer Air Cargo Week's question than any Brussels communiqué. If the volumes arrive, the mandate becomes industrial policy that worked; if they slip, Europe's airlines and freight operators will be buying scarcity at a regulated price.