General News
Below are links to stories of general interest in relation to aviation and airports.
TUI to offer train tickets instead of short-haul flights to 6 cities, from the Netherlands
Holiday company TUI will replace plane seats with train tickets on some routes from the Netherlands, in an effort to reduce its carbon footprint (while continuing to encourage more people to fly on holidays). Passengers booking Tui city breaks will be offered the chance to travel by rail from the Netherlands to six European cities - to Copenhagen, Prague, Vienna, Venice, Milan and Florence. The move will be launched by TUI’s Dutch division as part of a collaboration with train travel start-up Green City Trip. Flight tickets will still be available for those routes.
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High Court hearing granted on the Bristol Airport expansion ruling
Bristol Airport Action Network (BAAN) campaigners have been given permission to go to the High Court to appeal against the expansion of Bristol Airport. The date is still to be set. A judge has decided that BAAN raised arguable grounds following the Planning Inspectorate's (PI) decision to permit expansion of annual capacity, from 10 to 12 million passengers. The airport will continue to fight for their expansion. Government planning inspectors granted permission for the expansion plans, on appeal in February, after the plans were rejected by North Somerset Council in 2020 on environmental grounds. These include far higher carbon emissions, more noise, more air pollution and more road traffic. BAAN has raised more than £20,000, through crowd funding, to pay for legal costs to support its appeal. Stephen Clarke, from BAAN, said: "The idea that airports can just continue to expand without limit, in the middle of a climate and ecological crisis, is so obviously wrong. We are delighted that the judge agrees we have arguable grounds that the inspector's decision has errors in law and we look forward to the full hearing." If the court rules in favour of BAAN, then the PI will have to reconsider its decision.
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For 20 years the aviation industry has missed every [except one] of their sustainability targets – that will probably continue
A report commissioned by the climate charity Possible assessed every target set by the airline industry since 2000 and found that nearly all had been missed, revised or quietly ignored. This undermines a UK government plan to leave airlines to reduce their emissions through self-regulation. There are a range of targets that cover various measure of carbon efficiency. The levels of ambition underpinning the targets were generally insufficient, even if met, to reduce the absolute climate impact of aviation in the context of ongoing growth in demand. Business behaviour does not appear to be driven by environmental targets. The target setting often appears to function principally as a tactic for giving an impression to the public and policymakers, of progress and action being taken to address aviation’s environmental impacts in order to prevent any policy barriers to ongoing growth in the industry. The research found unclear definitions, opaque monitoring and inconsistent reporting made many targets difficult to assess, with many also suddenly changed, replaced or dropped. Even if met, they were insufficiently ambitious to reduce aviation’s climate impact.
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EU urged to cut emissions from aviation faster – and address the aromatics problem
Ciarán Cuffe, a Green MEP who is shadow rapporteur for the ReFuelEU Aviation file in the European Parliament’s transport committee, has called for the EU’s "clean" aviation fuels law to be amended to include non-CO2 effects. This includes the release of soot and harmful gases, including sulphur and nitrogen oxide, as well as water vapour, from jet engines. The EU’s proposed green aviation law overlooks the true climate cost of flying, with the non-CO2 effects of air travel producing 2-4 times the impact of CO2 emissions. He says it is not credible to delay by another decade and rely solely on voluntary industry efforts. This hasn’t worked up until now, and it won’t work in the future. Some of the non-CO2 impacts are due to aromatics in the fuel (compounds like propyl benzene, tetralin and p-xylene). So there are demands to reduce the amount of these, and sulphur content, in jet fuel. However these aromatics are important in current jet engine design, as they help swell seals and improve flow. If the industry goes for more novel fuels in future, these do not contain aromatics. So either aromatics will have to be added to the fuels, to protect the engines - or engines will have to be adapted.
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IAG, British Airways parent company, records heavy loss for first quarter of 2022
British Airways’ parent company, IAG, has recorded a heavy loss for the first three months of the year as the Omicron Covid variant cut passenger numbers. Pre-tax losses for International Airlines Group were £916 million, although this was lower than the £1.2 billion loss in the same period in 2021. IAG says there is more business flying, a higher load factor, and more premium leisure passengers. It says it expects to return to profitability from April for the summer, and for 2022 as a whole. Flight capacity in the first 3 months of the year was 65% of 2019 levels, up from 58% between October and December. IAG is hoping this will rise to 80% between April and June, and 85% during July, August and September. However, there have been a lot of cancelled flights, due to shortage of ground staff, and IAG is reducing the number of short haul (ie. not quite such high carbon ...) flights.
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How middlemen carbon brokers take a cut from money meant to help offset CO2 emissions
Many airlines like to encourage their passengers to buy carbon offsets, so they can hope the impact of the carbon their flight puts into the atmosphere is somehow reduced. There are many arguments against the uses of offsets, and reasons why they are ineffective - what is needed is preventing the CO2 being emitted today, not hopes of it being removed in several years. But now joint research by Greenpeace's Unearthed, and others, has found that much of the money that is paid for a carbon offset - in the hope it will go to some project that is attempting to reduce carbon - in practice is ending up in the hands of brokers and middlemen. The carbon offset market is booming, with many new schemes - and money to be made by those working in finance, who themselves do nothing to reduce carbon emissions. There is a serious lack of regulation and transparency in the carbon markets, and that needs to change. The research found cases where brokers bought carbon credits from forestry projects in poorer countries, and sold them on to consumers and companies, including airlines and oil firms, at much higher prices - making a huge profit.
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Judge Holgate’s decision on legality of Southampton Airport runway extension approval expected soon
A High Court ruling, by Justice Holgate, on whether the decision by Eastleigh Borough Council to grant planning permission for the 163 metre extension of the runway at Southampton Airport was unlawful is expected in the coming days. In April 2021, Eastleigh Borough Council voted to approve planning permission for the scheme. Then this was followed in July 2021 by a judicial review (JR) claim filed by GOESA Ltd - the local opposition group. They say the decision should have been called in, for decision by the Secretary of State, and that Southampton Airport has greatly overstated the economic benefits of the expansion and underplayed the environmental impacts. Following an oral hearing in December, permission was granted for a JR, and this was finally heard on April 27 and 28, with Justice Holgate presiding over the case. The review considered the environmental impacts of the scheme, legal and planning issues and whether the plan should have been called in. The judge said a confidential draft of his decision would be circulated to the QCs and their legal teams in the coming days, with a final version to be made public shortly after.
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Government needs ‘coherent position’ and policy on aviation carbon emissions’ before giving CAA more responsibility on environmental issues
The Transport Committee has told the government that it must review the powers granted to the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to facilitate the introduction of more environmental constraints. In its new report, "UK aviation: reform for take-off" the Transport Committee says: “The Government must review how the Civil Aviation Authority’s powers can be reformed to enable the regulator to enforce environmental mandates that the Government may introduce for the aviation sector.” The problem is that the government does not have much policy on the environmental impacts, especially carbon emissions and noise, for aviation. The AEF says that, as an arm of the central government, the CAA is hamstrung by whichever regulations are put in place – or not – by Downing Street. If there are no standards or policies from government, there is little for the CAA to regulate. This is the case for noise, since the government closed down the ICCAN and handed its responsibilities to the DfT. We need the Government to actually introduce some meaningful environmental standards for aviation before the CAA can be brought in to enforce them.
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Heathrow fears drop in air travel demand this winter after summer travel ‘bubble’
In July 2021, Heathrow had £2.9 billion of losses due to the Covid pandemic. By the end of March 2022, the losses were £4 billion. The total consolidated net debt of Heathrow Finance plc was £15.4 billion in January 2022 and £15.576 in March 2022. Heathrow is hoping for a huge increase in its passenger number this year, compared to last year - though it will still be below the number in 2019. Its 2022 passenger forecast has risen from 45.5 million to 52.8 million, but that is still just 65% of the 2019 pre-pandemic level. But Heathrow is till expecting to remain in the red in 2022. There is a current bubble of air travel demand, as people want to go abroad after being in the UK during the pandemic. But it seems likely that with the high price of oil, the considerable cost of living increase, lower GDP growth, continuing Covid around the world, and uncertainties with the Ukraine war, demand for flights will fall after the summer. Heathrow is anticipating a “winter freeze” in demand. It is possible there will be another Covid variant of concern later this year, that could see the return of UK travel restrictions, deterring people from flying.
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World’s biggest carbon removal machine ‘freezes over’ in Iceland – illustrating the myth of future CCS
Global emissions of CO2 are around 36 billion metric tonnes from the burning of fossil fuels. Taking into account emissions from land use change, it is well over 40 billion. To prevent further climate change, very little more greenhouse gases should be added to the atmosphere, beyond what the natural carbon sinks (oceans, forests, vegetation, soils etc) can remove annually. So that means humanity should be removing many billions of tonnes of CO2, into permanent storage, each year. That is in addition to increasing the amount stored temporarily in trees and vegetation. So far the only machines doing carbon capture and storage (CCS) can only remove tiny quantities of CO2. Now the Orca machine in Iceland has had problems due to unusually cold weather ... When working well, it might remove 4,000 tonnes per year (at huge cost). There would thus need to be 1 million such machines to remove 4 billion tonnes per year. That really is not going to happen. Though there are many dozen CCS machines already working, most send the CO2 into oil reserves, for "enhanced oil recovery" (surely not the spirit of removing the CO2 in the first place - but profitable). Otherwise, who will pay to store the CO2, if it cannot be sold, for a profit?