The airline industry’s metabolism is ordinarily slow – planes ordered years in advance, routes plotted and pilots trained with measured care. During the pandemic, though, decisions had to be made with uncommon speed. Late in March, for instance, a KLM flight somewhere above Novosibirsk, bearing towards Shanghai, was told that every incoming flight crew now had to quarantine for 14 days in a Chinese state hospital. This rule was so new that it hadn’t existed when the plane left Amsterdam; circumstances had changed mid flight. Executives scrambled to get an approved exemption from Dutch and Chinese authorities so that the crew could stay aboard the plane in Shanghai and bring it home 18 hours later.
The same month, Elbers retired three Boeing 747s – huge, fuel-guzzling craft that were on the verge of being put out to pasture anyway. Mere weeks later, they had to be hastily pulled out of storage and pressed into service to ferry medical equipment and PPE from China to the Netherlands. There were complicated repatriation flights to be flown. Two thousand Dutch travellers had to be retrieved from Australia. The first repatriation flight to Sydney had to leave with 48 hours’ notice, but it had been 20 years since KLM had flown there – so long that the routes and permits had to be plotted afresh and reloaded into flight computers.
Samanth Subramanian
Interesting insight into some of the lesser known aspects of the airline industry, and how it was brutally disrupted by the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic early last year. Unfortunately for the people in this business – and for those of us who enjoy traveling and can’t wait to get on a plane to a new destination – the future appears increasingly turbulent. The new omicron variant of the virus has prompted new travel restrictions, echoing the measures put in place at the beginning of the pandemic, though on a much smaller scale. And the migrant crisis at the EU border with Belarus has been partly defused by stopping incoming passengers from the Middle East. Another incident from earlier this year, also involving Belarus, which forced a Ryanair flight to land in order to capture a dissident, points to the increasing uncertainty and risks when boarding a flight caused by rising international tensions.
On the medium term, the aviation business is on a crash course with climate change, as are many other areas of modern life – and marginally improving fuel efficiency is not going to be enough to reduce CO2 emissions. There are some technological solutions of the horizon fortunately. I personally would not put much faith in a hydrogen-powered airplane, given its higher risk of explosion, but synthetic kerosene might become a sustainable solution, provided the energy used to manufacture it doesn’t come from burning fossil fuels. Just two months ago, the first commercial plant for making synthetic kerosene was inaugurated in Werlte, Germany. Its output is still minuscule compared to the rising needs of air transportation, but you need start somewhere to prove the process is viable.
Van Veen can outline stages of progress that might eventually turn flying into a zero-carbon enterprise, but she’s careful to note that this is an extrapolation – that it depends on new technologies bearing fruit. By 2030, KLM’s planes taking off from the Netherlands will use a fuel mix that’s 14% biofuel and “synthetic” kerosene, reducing both the need to drill for fresh oil and the emissions that the oil industry spews in the process. Synthetic kerosene – fuel concocted in a refinery – is expected to be made partly from carbon dioxide drawn out of the air, so its overall emissions will be up to 80% less than those from Jet A-1, Van Veen said. Over shorter distances, some planes might be hybrids, powered by batteries as well as fuel. And subsequently, by the middle of the next decade, she said,
we expect there will be a hydrogen-propelled aircraft launched in Europe. The hydrogen plane is the industry’s recurrent dream, its equivalent of cold fusion or the driverless car.
In Europe, governments have imposed environmental reforms among the terms for airline bailouts. In return for €7bn, for instance, Air France has committed to halving domestic flight emissions by 2024 and to restricting short-haul flights where trains run instead.
In the US, too, the government organised a $25bn aviation bailout, even though the four biggest airlines blew through nearly $40bn in cash over the last five years simply to buy back shares and prop up their stock prices. Here, there were no climate change riders.
Sustainability in the US is marginally more important than keeping enough toner in the fax machine, Aboulafia told me.
It occurs to me that producing synthetic fuels could also alleviate one of the problems of renewable energy sources, namely that output is variable and dependent on weather, and peak yield correlated poorly with peak consumption – in the case of solar power, it’s produced during the day, but people are consuming more during dusk and at night. Synthetic fuels could provide a means to store and transport energy generated by renewables, smoothing out these peaks. Not to mention we could use the existing distribution network of the oil industry to ship and consume synthetic fuels for heat and power generation.
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