HB-IOC, which was SWISS’s oldest Airbus A321 at the time, was duly celebrated when it made its last landing at its Zurich home base on 24 October 2022. Over its 27 years of service for Swissair and SWISS, the twinjet had carried more than seven million travellers and performed some 47,000 takeoffs and landings. It had also spent over 73,000 hours in the air and travelled the equivalent of 1,315 trips around the world or 137 out-and-back journeys to the Moon. You can find out more in our previous SWISS Magazine article about this venerable aircraft here.

Creative repurposing
For HB-IOC, though, this wasn’t the end of the story. Even after it has been withdrawn from service – and even if its retirement is due to the arrival of more advanced and more fuel-efficient successors – an aircraft will still have many valuable components. As did HB-IOC. So the withdrawn aircraft underwent the usual ‘part-out’, with personnel from SWISS Technics removing those elements that could either serve as spares for further members of the SWISS fleet or be used for training purposes. What was different about HB-IOC’s part-out, however, was that some of these parts have been upcycled, too – given a creative new function and thus a new lease of life.

As a result, some of HB-IOC is now being offered in the SWISS Recraft Collection: a special range of items aimed at aviation enthusiasts who are keen to add a little piece of aircraft history to their daily lives. It’s for them that SWISS has developed an exclusive line of accessories and furniture items such as baggage tags and key fobs, wall hooks, coat racks, bowls, mirrors and side tables. One particular highlight of the innovative new range is the specially-designed aircraft window, which can be mounted on a wall to serve as a bar or a display case. Parts of the fuselage skin and substructure and the inner and outer aircraft windows have all been reworked and reinterpreted by designers to create these unique new ‘recrafted’ items.

The SWISS Recraft Collection will be available online from the Worldshop from 1 November. A winglet and two exclusive SWISS wall bars will be offered on Switzerland’s Ricardo online auction platform from 21 October to 3 November, with the sale proceeds going to a good cause.SWISS’s first aircraft upcycling

SWISS’s first aircraft upcycling
The production of this first SWISS Recraft Collection underlines SWISS’s keen commitment to innovation, timeless aesthetics and finding intriguing new uses for top-quality materials. The unusual items in the new product range are both aesthetically appealing and functionally inspiring, and tellingly embody both the decades of service that HB-IOC provided and all the warm emotions which travel can arouse.

A pilot project that sets new benchmarks
SWISS is proud to operate one of Europe’s most advanced aircraft fleets, and invests continually in its further renewal. Alongside the use of sustainable aviation fuel, operating state-of-the-art aircraft is the most effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. This is why it is so vital to retire more carbon-intensive aircraft and replace them with new fuel-saving successors.

In addition to reducing emissions, integrated life cycle management is a further key element in SWISS’s embracing of its corporate responsibilities. And it’s here that the recycling and upcycling of HB-IOC fits into SWISS’s sustainability endeavours, by taking such efforts even further than they have ever been taken before. The A321’s withdrawal was used to trial new approaches that were intended to make the subsequent part-out process even more sustainable, in both ecological and economic terms. The pilot project’s aims: to set new standards for re-using and recycling materials at the end of an aircraft’s service life, and to see how even more of its components might be responsibly and effectively repurposed.

The entire withdrawal and disposal of Airbus A321 HB-IOC was based on the «Reuse, Upcycle, Recycle»-Pyramid, which provides a hierarchy for sustainable waste management. By adopting this approach, SWISS can minimize waste and further reduce its overall environmental impact.

You can find out more about the SWISS Recraft Collection, along with the history and the withdrawal of SWISS Airbus A321 HB-IOC, here.