Paul Steele, IATA
The aviation industry in 85 years
An industry association director asking, in public, whether his own organisation's targets will be met.
Paul Steele wrote this as director of aviation environment at the International Air Transport Association, which makes its central device slightly startling: the essay is constructed almost entirely out of questions the industry might be asked in 2093, and it does not answer most of them.
He starts with the Wright brothers. When they flew The Flyer in 1903, “little did they realise that in 50 years’ time their small and fragile aircraft would have been replaced by jet aircrafts and airlines would be flying passengers across the Atlantic.” The lesson he draws is about the limits of his own exercise: “just as for the Wright brothers, it is almost impossible for us to forecast what technological breakthroughs might be available for aviation in 2093.”
What he says can be done instead
If breakthroughs cannot be predicted, conditions for them can be built. His prescription is institutional rather than technical: foster co-operation and information sharing across all branches of the industry, fund research and development adequately, and “encourage innovation and pioneering research far beyond current market needs.”
That last clause is the substantive one. Research beyond current market needs is precisely what a competitive industry under fuel-cost pressure tends not to fund, and Steele is asking the sector to do it anyway. “In short, we must all have visions.”
The audit he sets up
He then borrows H.G. Wells’s time machine and asks what an observer in 2093 would see looking back. The questions come in a rush, and several are uncomfortable for the body he represents. What will we be saying about fuel efficiency in eighty-five years? Was IATA’s 2007 environmental vision realised? Did we build that zero-emissions aircraft by 2057? What could we have done better or differently?
Others are open in a more ordinary way. What will aircraft look like, and what will propel them? Will oil have run out? How many manufacturers will there be, how many airlines? Will air travel still be affordable, and will people still want to cross oceans? Will the problems visible in 2008 be solved by the end of the century, or replaced by a new set?
An industry association director asking in public whether his own organisation’s environmental vision will turn out to have been realised is not the usual register for this kind of publication.
The record he puts on the table
The essay does commit to figures on the industry’s past performance. Fuel efficiency improved 70 per cent over the four decades to 2008, with a further 25 per cent expected by 2020.
He then sets out the IATA position agreed in 2007: a stated vision of a carbon-free future, supported by a four-pillar strategy — investing in technology, flying aircraft more efficiently, building and operating efficient infrastructure, and developing positive economic instruments such as tax credits and research funding. Of the four, he singles out technology, “including research and investment in biofuels”, as key.
And he is unambiguous about the limit of the other three: “Technology is the only way to zero emissions. The challenge is to build better planes and more efficient engines powered by non-carbon sources.” The building blocks he names as already existing are solar power, hydrogen cells and biofuels.
He also offers a periodisation worth recording. Aviation’s tubular jet age, he suggests, ran for about a hundred years — implying that the shape of the airliner familiar in 2008 was itself a phase rather than a settled answer.
Scoring it
The efficiency claim held up. Fuel burn per seat kilometre continued to improve at broadly the rate described, driven by engine design and lighter structures.
The four-pillar framework survived as the industry’s organising language, and the economic instruments pillar grew into the offsetting and market-based measures that became aviation’s main formal climate mechanism. That is not what “carbon-free future” implies, and the gap between the two is the honest answer to one of his own questions.
The zero-emissions aircraft by 2057 is the question that matters most and the one now looking worst. Hydrogen and battery-electric programmes for large commercial aircraft have repeatedly slipped, and the near-term decarbonisation route the industry actually took was drop-in sustainable fuels — the biofuel pillar, scaled far more slowly and expensively than 2008 assumed, and competing for the same land that Atte Korhola’s essay in the same section wanted kept for food.
Steele asked whether the problems of 2008 would be solved or replaced. Mostly they were neither. They were rescheduled.