Atte Korhola, University of Helsinki
Will there be a return to elegance of flying?
From a 1909 monoplane to the IPCC's 2050 scenarios, by way of the best-sourced essay in the project.
Atte Korhola opens not with emissions but with a suicide. The Demoiselle monoplane, developed in Paris between 1898 and 1909, was called in its time the world’s most graceful, lightest and smallest flying machine. Its builder, the Brazilian-French pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, took flight to mean beauty and excitement. He is said to have been deeply shaken by seeing the bombers of the First World War and the destruction they caused; the collapse of that ideal drove him into depression and ultimately to his death.
It is a pointed way for a professor of environmental change to begin. The essay’s question is whether flight can recover the meaning Santos-Dumont gave it, after a century in which it became first a weapon, then a commodity, then a symbol of environmental harm.
How the romance was lost
“No other form of travel has encompassed so many dreams and romanticism as the human aspiration to fly,” Korhola writes, tracing it through dreams, ancient tales, religious myth and the psalms. Flight became the emblem of the technological revolution and of humanity’s capacity to exceed its own limits. Then it became ordinary.
“Then came the concern about climate change.” Environmental organisations, he notes, singled out air transport specifically as a symbol of a polluting way of life. He puts the resulting question directly: “Should we then draw back within our limits, give up our wings and the age-old dream to fly?”
The numbers he brings
He does not answer rhetorically. The essay is the best-sourced piece in the project.
World air traffic was growing 5 to 10 per cent a year, fastest in the Far East. World Bank figures showed passenger numbers rising 28 per cent between 2003 and 2004 alone. UK passenger volume was forecast to double to around 475 million by 2030. Air transport accounted for around 2 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions from human activity, expected to exceed 3 per cent by 2050.
Then the correction that the two-per-cent figure invites. Aviation also produces nitrogen oxides, hydrocarbons and water vapour, all climate-warming, and on some estimates air transport could account for up to 10 per cent of all climate-warming emissions of human origin by 2050. In the European Union it was already the fastest-growing emissions sector.
He then states the trap plainly. Emissions per passenger and tonne kilometre had fallen significantly and were expected to keep falling as technology improved. It does not help enough: “despite this, the strong growth in air traffic will increase energy consumption and emissions worldwide.” On the IPCC baseline scenario he cites, a six-fold increase in aviation by 2050 would still produce a 2.7-fold increase in fuel consumption.
Efficiency gains of that size, outrun by growth of that size, is the arithmetic the industry has been arguing about ever since.
Why he answers yes anyway
Asked whether there will be a return to elegance of flying, Korhola writes: “I believe so.” His reasoning is comparative rather than technological. Air transport is in principle an extremely ecological way of moving: it happens in the air, it does not consume land, and it does not fragment habitats or weaken natural diversity the way roads and railways do.
This is the land-use argument that runs through the whole project, and here it is made by the environmental scientist rather than by the airline. His stated priority for the century is not carbon at all: “The future challenge is sustainable development, especially with respect to adequate supplies of water and food, and land use. The more asphalt there is on the globe, the less forest and farmland.”
Set against a road network, a runway occupies very little ground for the distance it serves. That is a real argument, and in 2008 it was an unusual one to hear from a university environmental department.
What the essay does not resolve
The tension it leaves open is the one the following fifteen years made concrete. If aviation’s route away from kerosene runs through biofuel, then the land-use advantage Korhola rests his optimism on gets spent buying the fuel — crops for aviation compete for exactly the arable land he wants protected. The essay does not connect its own two halves, and the IATA contribution alongside it names biofuels as a key building block without noticing the collision either.
Santos-Dumont, incidentally, has one more claim on the argument than the essay makes of him. He never patented his designs, publishing them freely because he believed flight belonged to everyone.