The elephant in the middle aisle

Author: Celeste Hicks

In the autumn budget, Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced a 50% increase in Air Passenger Duty (APD) on certain private jet flights, and launched a consultation on taking this further to apply to smaller jets next year. 

Revulsion at the super rich jetting off to a party on a yacht seems easy to muster. Oxfam recently released a report that revealed that 50 of the richest billionaires emit more CO2 in just under three hours than the average British person does in their whole lifetime. 

While most people don’t travel to their annual holiday on private jets, the APD move may foreshadow a different discussion about  how we use commercial aviation and how far we travel. There are still many flights leaving the UK that cover distances that can easily be done by train. Top of the list is Dublin – the most popular international destination in terms of number of passengers departing on flights from the UK (9.4m passengers in 2023), and followed by Amsterdam (7.9m). Dublin can be reached in 8.5 hours by Rail & Sail (and the price is also subsidised by the UK government), and Amsterdam can be reached from London on a direct Eurostar train journey approximately 4.5 hours long.

These numbers suggest that a sustained campaign to shift passengers onto train alternatives could make a decent dent in the amount of associated carbon emissions. In fact, in 2023 France went so far as to ban short haul flights where there is a train alternative under 2.5 hours, and the Lib Dems made a pledge in their 2024 election manifesto to follow suit in the UK if they were elected.

A simple fix to aviation’s decarbonisation challenge? As with everything in the aviation world, it’s not that simple. A new research paper by Dobruszkes, Mattioli and Gozzoli suggests that while action on short haul is important, it would have “very limited climate benefits”. The research showed that flights of less than 500km account for 26.7% of flights, but only 5.2% of fuel burnt; while flights of 4000km or more account for just 5.1% of flights, but 39% of fuel burnt. This tallies with AEF’s findings that shows that in terms of carbon emitted from flights from the UK to destinations around the world, the worst offenders are indeed long haul – in top place is the US with 23.6% of the UK’s international flight emissions (10.6Mt), and Dubai with 6.7%. What’s more, the new research paper showed that since the mid-1990s, the long-haul segment has grown much more rapidly (+163 % seat-km) than the super-short-haul one (+28 %). 

The picture is further muddied by the question of whether short haul flights might offer the best short-term opportunity to replace fossil fuel powered planes with electric or hydrogen planes. Manufacturers concede that the prospects for developing electric or hydrogen planes for super long haul routes are distant indeed, and look unlikely on a commercial scale before 2050. Currently, the industry argues that the only option for decarbonising these flights is SAF, and we have written many column inches about why this is an inherently risky approach. However, there are promising signs that some fossil-fuel powered short-haul flights could be replaced, such as the so-called “island hops” to from the Highlands to the Islands in Scotland. There is an argument to be had in rapidly scaling up investment to test these hydrogen fuel-cell and hybrid electric planes further on short-haul flights to Europe, which could then spur technological advancement faster for the long-haul flights. Indeed, if further raises in APD on private jets do emerge, there could be an opportunity to offer concessions to companies who are first to deploy zero-emissions technology. 

Yet again we are faced with the dilemma that there really are no simple solutions for aviation. It seems that there is no other option but to push for all the solutions at once – including behaviour change, modal shift for short-haul AND a huge increase in investment for technological advances. While action on reducing demand for short haul flights must play an important role in encouraging people to think about the very real carbon impact of their flights, and particularly those frequent flyers who are making multiple short trips to European destinations a year, it can’t be at the expense of pushing for faster action in the areas where the carbon emissions really will continue to remain stubbornly high in the medium term. 

There’s a delicate balance to find in promoting fleet replacement and new technologies, without creating further growth in an industry which is rapidly becoming an outlier in its stubborn inability to meaningfully decarbonise. Any action to deliver fossil-free aviation in the short-haul segment must go hand in hand with reducing demand and increasing the price of long-haul flights. At the same time, policy makers must prioritise radical action to combat the non-CO2 effects of some of those flights, particularly on routes across the Atlantic which are where damaging persistent contrails are most likely to form.

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