Funded equally by the European Commission and Europe's aeronautical industry, Clean Sky is a Joint Technology Initiative designed to speed up the technology breakthroughs needed to achieve ACARE's environmental goals. As a public-private partnership, it aims to develop, mature and validate key “clean technologies” for aviation in order to shorten the time to market for new solutions tested on Full Scale Demonstrators. With a budget estimated at EUR 1.6 billion over 7 years, Clean Sky is expected to lead the earlier introduction of new, radically greener Air Transport products.

The following text provides a presentation of the organisation and current state of play of the initiative as well as an overview of the flagship technologies developed within the programme, each one of those leading to five observations on the promising approach of research and innovation promoted by Clean Sky.