Sustainable Aviation Futures: Volume 4

This chapter examines the torsions and blind spots that structure the contemporary debate on the politics and policy of aviation. It also generates different scenarios for the future of air travel, which can help to unblock the current impasse about the perceived costs and benefits of aviation and its attendant infrastructural needs.

This chapter characterises and evaluates the competing frames that organise the contested realities of air transport. By mapping out the current fault lines of aviation politics and policy, the chapter is also able to delineate four main scenarios regarding the future of aviation, which we name the ‘post-carbon’, ‘high-modernist’, ‘market regulation’ and ‘demand management’ projections respectively.

The chapter problematises and criticises the existing literature, policy reports and stakeholder briefings that inform the contemporary standoff in UK aviation policy. It uses the definition of sustainable development as a heuristic device to map and identify the fault lines structuring contemporary debates on aviation futures. It then builds upon this analysis to delimit four different scenarios for the future of flying.

The chapter analyses the contested realities of aviation politics. It re-affirms the political nature of such divisions, which in turn structure the rival understandings of aviation. The analysis suggests that the identified fault lines are constantly reiterated by competing appeals to ambiguous and contradictory evidence-bases or policy frames. Ultimately, the chapter claims that any significant reframing of aviation policy and politics rests on the outcome of political negotiations and persuasion. But it also depends on the broader views of citizens and stakeholders about the future challenges facing society, as well as the way in which governments and affected agents put in place and coordinate the multiple arenas in which a dialogue over the future of aviation can be held. Aviation futures cannot be reduced to the narrow confines of the technical merits or claims surrounding the feasibility of policy instruments.

The chapter discusses two main themes: shifts in the global geography of aviation toward the developing world and several threats to the future growth of air transportation. The past two decades have witnessed a remarkable realignment of air passenger and air cargo traffic toward middle-income countries and the hubs within those countries.

The chapter documents these shifts, drawing on analyses of airline capacity around the world in 1998 and 2012. Given more rapid population and economic growth in Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Latin America, further such developments seem likely. However, the chapter also reviews some of the principal challenges confronting aviation in its second century. These include the higher price of oil, the political challenges involved in building new airport infrastructure (especially in rich democracies), and efforts to limit the increase in greenhouse gas emissions and other air transportation externalities.

The chapter concludes that none of these challenges is very likely to reverse the long-term growth of air traffic but will instead intersect with the broader shift toward emerging markets to produce a still more complex geography of air services. The chapter further contends that the continued expansion of aviation will bring both daunting challenges to the world but also new opportunities to the low-income countries still marginalized in today’s airline networks.

Despite the high profile of climate change rhetoric and the carbon intensive nature of flying, policies for controlling CO₂ from aviation remain at odds with global commitments on climate change. Taking a carbon budgeting approach to compare future aviation scenarios with the scale of necessary emission reductions demonstrates the extent of this contradiction. The significant potential for ongoing aviation growth contrasts with the need to curb substantially global CO₂ emissions across all sectors. For even a 50:50 chance of staying within the 2°C threshold, emission pathways imply around a 75% cut in absolute emissions by 2050 (from 1990 levels). Set against this, aviation’s CO₂ emissions are expected to grow by between 170% and 480% over the same period, and they could feasibly be higher still.

For the international community to be serious about its climate change commitments, moral and ethical concerns need to be considered alongside technical and economic issues. It is timely to question whether expansion of an industry with few technological options for decarbonisation is a reasonable way to gamble with our future.

To examine the role of new aeronautical technologies in improving commercial aviation’s environmental performance.

Reviews the environmental improvements that may be conferred through the adoption of alternative aviation fuels and new airframe, engine and navigation technologies.

Although aeronautical technologies have evolved considerably since the earliest days of powered flight, the aviation industry is now reaching a point of diminishing returns as growing global consumer demand for air transport outstrips incremental improvements in environmental efficiency. The chapter describes some of the technological interventions that are being pursued to improve aviation’s environmental performance and discusses the extent to which these innovations will help to deliver a more sustainable aviation industry.

This chapter considers the application of climate mitigation policies to the aviation sector with reference to the inclusion of aviation in the EU Emissions Trading System (EU ETS). Assessments of the possible economic impacts of including aviation in the EU ETS are reviewed and an impact analysis using the macroeconometric E3ME model is conducted.

The aviation sector is a significant and rapidly increasing source of GHG emissions. Because international policy measures have not been agreed, the EU has incorporated aviation in the EU ETS. It is therefore important to consider the possible economic effects of the ETS on the aviation industry and the wider economy.

The paper describes the approach used by the EU to include aviation in the EU ETS. Assessments of economic impacts have been made, but have often been limited in their approach. The paper complements the existing literature by including an economic analysis using the E3ME macroeconometric model of the EU that covers 41 industrial sectors including aviation.

Microeconomic and macroeconomic assessments show the economic impacts of including the aviation sector in the EU ETS are small. The negative impacts, if any, on EU GDP and the air transport sector’s economic output are less than 0.1% and 1% respectively. Distortions in competition, both between countries and industrial sectors, are therefore likely to be small.

In the long term (beyond 2020), including aviation in the EU can be seen as a positive move. If and when aviation is fully included in the EU ETS, and when the cost impacts of GHG emissions through permit prices are made evident, it is anticipated that airlines will start monitoring and reducing their GHG emissions by investing in new, less carbon intensive technologies.

Drawing on an original dataset of major European airport companies, this chapter demonstrates the growing role airport infrastructures and their managing authorities have come to play in shaping airport politics that is, how, by whom and where airports are built, modernized and expanded.

Airport infrastructures and companies have received little attention in recent attempts to characterize and explain the transformations of global aviation politics.

This chapter suggests focusing on airport companies as an attempt to characterize their long-term trajectories both in terms of their properties and in terms of their operating contexts.

The chapter shows that airport managing authorities have developed into full-blown economic actors, which enjoy greater levels of autonomy through the systematic accumulation of resources, the diversification of revenues, and new alliances with the global finance and consulting industry. The chapter also discusses the role of privatization as the main driver for change in major European airport markets. Finally, it demonstrates the extent to which the complex interplay between public and private ownership has shaped the rescaling of the territorial dimension of airport activities, thus explaining the limited impact of anti-airport campaigns over the long-term development of major European hubs.

This chapter has larger practical and research implications, as it demonstrates the need to go beyond a functional and context-dependent approach to airport infrastructures and managing companies.

This chapter addresses the political history of aircraft noise annoyance and its relationship to sustainability.

Using extensive case studies and secondary sources, the chapter shows how a particular approach to noise annoyance that emerged already accepted large-scale annoyance. The focus is directed towards the black boxing of political decisions with scientific knowledge.

This contribution demonstrates that noise annoyance policy has shaped citizens’ perceptions of aircraft sound and has intensified the associated annoyance. Finally, the discussion considers the significance of the participation of citizens and the political implications of these findings. Currently, participation is predominantly confined within a growth paradigm and reproduces tensions in ecological modernization policies. Participation and protest can inadvertently engage these tensions and question the participatory practices themselves. A moratorium on ‘growth’ might create the necessary space for fundamentally rethinking aviation and sustainability.

This chapter provides a critical discussion of air to rail mode substitution. Environmental impacts, intermodal competition and integration are considered, examining advantages and disadvantages as well as opportunities and constraints.

Both operation and life-cycle analysis perspectives show that high-speed rail (HSR) is much ‘greener’ than air transport (per seat-km or per passenger-km) provided that the former achieves high load factors and the latter lower load factors and that freed runway capacity is not reused. HSR travel time is its main competitive advantage against air transport, and a 600-km flight is arguably the current limit for robust intermodal effects.

The potential for air–HSR integration at the airport relies on various service, business and technical constraints. Even when it is successful, its environmental benefit appears to be marginal, if not negative, if airport capacity is reused for longer flights. In the current context, such integration appears more like a business opportunity for airlines, airports and train operators rather than a sustainable option. Yet the environmental benefit of integration may be larger within potential integrated transport policies.

The chapter explores the sustainability of European aeromobility and the socio-technical systems that enable it by examining how certain threats, risk and uncertainties are managed in European airspace.

The chapter examines the discussions around the inception and deployment of methods of ‘crisis management’ to airspace governance and focuses on the importation of particular systems of knowledge, practices and technologies from other contexts.

The chapter finds that European authorities have installed a combination of capacities involving central and decentralised coordination and decision making – as well as training and simulation – in order to better anticipate and respond to moments of crisis, although the politics of such an arrangement is not unproblematic to the interests of state sovereignty and the airlines’ suspicion of regulation or lack thereof.

The chapter is one of the first to make explicit how ash-cloud crises and disruption to airspace are being governed post the more immediate consequences of the 2010 ash cloud.

To examine the general political structure and background to decision making in aviation policy.

Largely conceptual and theoretical, applied to political and historical examples.

That ‘politics as usual’ signifies a structure characterised by adherence to underlying presuppositions which guide political and economic action and that moves towards different ways of thinking and acting and that environmental policy faces an uphill battle in the light of these often unacknowledged and typically unquestioned presuppositions.

Political action requires an accurate understanding of the circumstances in which it is to be undertaken. This chapter provides a clue to that proper understanding and hence is valuable for the appropriate orientation of political action.

The chapter employs an everyday term, ‘politics as usual’, and analyses its structure, claiming that it identifies a real underlying set of default positions in politics.

This chapter focuses on the conflicts that have accompanied the development of Germany’s largest airport at Frankfurt/Main and examines how these conflicts are embedded in regional governance and airport planning. In the German context, the governance discourse is understood as a multi-faceted framework of actors, institutions and legislation that structures the actions of involved people.

The conflicts within this framework are structured by two aspects: the spatiality of the contested object, which results in tactical descriptions of the space involved, and an understanding of airports as parts of large technological systems which strongly influences the discourse of airport expansion. As spatial conflicts regarding large infrastructures develop over a long period of time, the chapter charts the historical evolution of the expansion conflict from the 1980s until today. It analyses the governance structure and the actor’s constellations throughout time to shed light on the use of narratives and the stability and change of pro and contra coalitions. It concludes with a critical reflection on the role of airports in the German planning system and the problems of governance in the multilevel, multi-actor environment of airports.

The chapter highlights the necessity of examining the environmental impact of airports at different scales, from neighbouring cities to the large labour market stretching up to 100km from the airport.