This week, as rocketing fuel prices ground planes all over Europe, the head of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) told its annual meeting: “The situation is desperate.”
Fuel prices could cost the industry $3bn this year – more economic damage than the September 11 terrorist outrage. The industry has long been in denial. Even as other manufacturers struggle to absorb the stark messages of Stern and others about the economic consequences of climate change, aircraft users and builders persist in addressing some other problem: “Yes, Mrs Lincoln, but next time we’ll put on a better play.”
The industry is aware it faces huge environmental challenges. But while everyone else worries about climate change, the industry’s PR blitzes concentrate on everything but the real problem – its refusal to manage demand.
Five years ago the Department for Transport and the Treasury put the annual cost of UK aviation-induced climate change at £1.4bn. But, though the costs of noise and local air quality were put much lower – at £25m and between £120m and £240m respectively – the industry prefers to put noise at the top of its to-do list. Hence a big PR hoop-la 18 months ago about the results of its now-forgotten ‘Silent Aircraft Initiative’.
A cynic might assert that that’s because the industry thinks silent flying opens up the prospect of round-the-clock take-offs and landings at conventional airports and the building of new airports nearer city centres. It seems to think governments and eco-lobbyists will welcome the prospects of more rather than fewer flights – and a runway in Hyde Park.
But PR froth doesn't get any frothier than the recent stunts to kid the public that planes will soon be flying on alternative fuels. Any event led by Richard Branson promises that the froth-substance ratio will approach that of any number divided by zero. In February, a Virgin plane flew from London's Heathrow to Schipol, Amsterdam, in what was claimed to be the first biofuelled flight by an airline. To hear Branson talk you’d think it was a new dawn. Five per cent of the fuel for that flight was of non-oil origin and even that had consumed 150,000 coconuts for a 40-minute flight.
To the Society of British Aerospace Companies’ (SBAC) great credit, a series of briefing papers it’s now producing makes absolutely clear that there is very little prospect of a replacement for the aviation standard, kerosene, in the next 30 years.
Aircraft use kerosene for a number of reasons. The main one is that it works as well on boiling-hot days in Dubai or Tucson as on days below zero in Anchorage or Arkangelsk – or on any day at altitude. So the industry has already invested billions not just in developing the engines that use it, but on fuel supplies and storage systems on the ground.
Any replacement would have to be a ‘drop-in’: it must work as well in all this infrastructure as kerosene now does without any risk of the supply being interrupted. To make it worthwhile to throw kerosene out, the replacement would have to be much greener, producing much less CO2 and other emissions than kerosene.
The replacement ‘green’ fuel would have to be just as stable as kerosene: it must not deteriorate when stored over long periods, or damage any of the aircraft materials or systems it came into contact with. And all that at the same or lower cost than kerosene.
As yet it can’t be done, though the engine makers and oil companies are working hard on trying to find such a miracle substance. So, whatever Mr Branson tells you, don’t hold your breath.
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