A Long Flight Ahead

Through the course of this blog I aim to travel through the history of commercial aviation, the environmental impacts of air travel, how environmental concerns associated with it are perceived today, and how the aviation industry is responding to such concerns - this is a very loose structure and I'm sure other things will pop up (there may be some unexpected turbulence for instance).

I thought a fitting way into it all would be to share this video published by British Airways on their YouTube channel last week, where Willie Walsh, CEO of the International Airlines Group (AIG), the parent company of British Airways, discuses the  current challenges the aviation industry faces with respect to climate change.

He consolidates the point I made in my previous post on how despite only accounting for around 2% of CO₂ emissions  - aviation has become a "whipping boy" to current climate issues as it is recognised its contribution will only increase. He calls on governments to work together in developing a global scheme covering aviation which can be adhered to by all airlines, and that assistance (read funding?!) should be provided much like it is in developing sustainable fuels for cars, to the airline industry where for the foreseeable future, there will be a reliance on a liquid based, carbon fuel.  

Concerns on the impact air travel was having on the environment were only extensively addressed in the 1999 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on 'Aviation and the Global Atmosphere'. This was despite calls being made in the late 60s and 70s on the potential impact of contrails relating to aviation, however this was only on the effect supersonic aircraft had on stratospheric ozone (Lee et al. 2009) (which doesn't really help us!). 

In a short space of time our knowledge of the environmental impacts of aviation have increased greatly to become one of the more hotly debated environmental issues of the 21st century. 10 years on from the IPCC aviation report, airlines were to pledge to cut CO₂ emissions to half the 2005 level by 2050 - this was championed by none other than Willie Walsh with the hopes that if it was approved, it would be added to the agenda at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit, marking concrete efforts to address aviation and climate change.