While recent air travel chaos points to system efficiency, it also highlights bigger, intersecting problems of overwhelming demand and sustainability that the airline industry must tackle.
The soaring demand for air travel, particularly in the busiest airports like Heathrow and Gatwick, makes the system highly vulnerable to even minor glitches, leading to massive delays.
The explanation from NATS, that a single erroneous data entry could lead to the grounding or delaying of thousands of flights elicited howls of disapproval from tourists and industry figures alike. An alternative view is that the system did precisely what it was meant to do and that delays are a small, though incredibly annoying, price to pay for the logistical and engineering miracle that is modern airline safety.
This challenge of capacity runs directly into a second – that of sustainability. While aviation represents a relatively small amount of global emissions – 2-3 per cent – that figure is predicted to increase when we need emissions across the board to be reduced. As I’ve argued on these pages before, we’ve already plucked most of the low hanging carbon reducing fruit.
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