Firstly a tribute to aeroplanes and what they mean to us: In 1903 when the Wright brothers managed “the first sustained and controlled heavier-than-air powered flight” it was a breakthrough moment for humanity - as evidenced by the fact that almost every child learns about this when growing up. The same kids also look up to the skies, see the stars, planets and occasionally planes and are awe-inspired in equal measure.
Aeroplanes take us around the world, bring communities closer together and enable many a connection that powers economies. This is something incredibly important to me personally for three reasons.
1. I have a desire to visit every corner of the planet (and I’m making decent headway on this target) and strongly believe that more people should do the same.
2. My wife and I lived far apart in the early stages of our relationship such that getting on a plane was the only way to sustain our relationship
3. I have learnt a lot from working in the UK, India, Australia and various parts of Africa and imagine many other people would benefit in the same way.
So my challenge is not to the concept of flying by any means -everyone deserves to experience both the joys of flying itself (I’m willing to bet you can recall many a happy memory associated with flying) as well as the outcomes of it - visiting a loved one in a distant land or just experiencing something new that nourishes you.
The worrying thing about flying is also certainly not its safety record. The chart below, nicely illustrated by Vox, should not be news to most - flying, when you consider the amount of distance you travel, is by far the safest mode of transport.
The worrying thing about flying is that every single plane that takes of has a large impact on our planet and we can’t even fully quantify the impact. And this becomes all the more worrying given that we are taking to the skies in aeroplanes at an ever faster rate than ever.
Let’s break these two components down:
Let’s say you wanted to fly to Tokyo to experience the marvels of the Japenese culture first hand, that is a distance of roughly 9500 kms by plane from London. According to the latest estimates, this will generate 4 tonnes of CO2 and other gases that will contribute to global warming.
4 tonnes is equivalent to burning a 100 sq metre patch of forest down. That is a little less than half the size of a tennis court.
Let that sink in for a minute. I expect that almost no reader of this article would ever contemplate burning any amount of beautiful forest land down, let alone a reasonable portion of it. Would you even know how to go about doing it? But the reality is this is what happens every time you fly - and it may not even be the complete picture.
The largest chunk of this is of course the fuel that is being burnt - and no there is no alternative fuel that we could feasible use (more on this here) for the aviation industry. The fuel is a double whammy because it not only burns and releases various greenhouse gases but also adds weight - almost a third of the weight at the time of take off is fuel! Incidentally, one outcome of this is that there is an optimal distance for flights - a point where the amount of fuel needed does not come at the cost of passenger and freight capacity, but at the same time it flies for a reasonable distance and maximises the amount of time in the air which is when it is much more efficient. David Parkinson, the creator of a new model for Air traffic control estimates this distance to be around 3000 miles.
The most worrying thing is that the emissions at a higher altitude are more potent than at ground level. This should make sense to anyone that knows about the Greenhouse effect - CO2 and other greenhouse gases we emit are having their impact by trapping heat in the atmosphere so dumping more CO2 at a higher altitude reduces chances of any absorption and directly leads to the warming of the planet. Here’s an extract from this scientific paper about them:
"CO2, released by all fuel-burning vehicles, can remain in the air for centuries, causing a gentle warming effect. By contrast, most other gases and impacts – such as the vapour trails and tropospheric ozone produced by planes at altitude – cause much more potent but shorter-lived bursts of warming."
But beyond this are those lovely wispy vapour trails you’ve all seen in the sky.
For those who like an analogy Duncan Clarke says on the Guardian, "generating global warming with CO2 is equivalent to slow-cooking the earth in a cast-iron skillet, whereas cooking the planet with vapour trails would be more like flash-frying it in an extra-hot wok."
Then there is a whole load of complexity about the non-CO2 gases’ impact on the high altitude environment - more on that here. The reality is that the science is very complex - there might be some cooling effects too, but put everything together and the net effect is definitely the warming up of the planet.
According to ICCT, the organisation that exposed the Volkswagen CO2 scandal, 2019 is forecast to be another record-breaking year for air travel, with passengers expected to fly a total of 8.1trillion kilometers, up 5% from last year and more than 300% since 1990.
[Incidentally, 8.1 trillion kilometers is the equivalent of doing 27,000 trips to the Sun and back!]
And this rapid increase is beyond what we had predicted - 70% higher! The total increase over the past five years was equivalent to building about 50 coal-fired power plants, says this Guardian article.
It is a sign of our times that the airline industry deserves credit as one of the few that acknowledges its carbon footprint and the devastating long term impact, and has started to make moves towards cutting back. However this alone is not enough.
There are two main reasons I believe we, the passengers, need to tackle the carbon emissions from aeroplanes:
There’s one more reason to do this now - there are many meaningful carbon offsetting schemes where the actual cost to deliver a negative carbon footprint (or ensure a fraction of the usual footprint is produced) that are still fairly cheap right now.
Here’s Duncan Clarke, author of The Rough Guide To Green Living, in his Guardian column:
There are all kinds of ways to reduce emissions very inexpensively. After all, a single low-energy lightbulb, available for just £1 or so, can over the space of six years save 250kg of CO2 – equivalent to a short flight. That's not to say that offsetting is necessarily valid, or that plugging in a low-energy lightbulb makes up for flying. The point is simply that the world is full of inexpensive ways to reduce emissions. In theory, if enough people started offsetting, or if governments started acting seriously to tackle global warming, then the price of offsets would gradually rise, as the low-hanging fruit of emissions savings – the easiest and cheapest "quick wins" – would get used up.
Just Google the distance to the place you travelled to, and we give you a flight (more airlines coming soon) and occupancy specific estimate of the carbon emissions generated per passenger. Better yet we give you the number in context - be prepared to be shocked.
If you would like, please hit submit (no personal data gathered whatsoever) - we just want to aggregate the numbers to give better averages in the future.
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