New critical load factor benchmark would favour operators with high seat densities legacy carriers may be badly hit
Europe's adoption of a critical load factor benchmark in its move to include aviation in its existing emissions trading scheme is coming under increasing scrutiny, as legacy carriers look set to lose out under existing plans.
The European Commission moved late last year to impose extra charges on foreign and domestic carriers flying between European airports from 2011, and a year later on all flights arriving at or departing from European Union airports.
The EC envisages that allocation of tradeable carbon credits will be based on a mix of auctioning and free allocation using the benchmark of passenger and cargo kilometres in tonne-kilometres - termed revenue tonne-kilometres or RTKs. An individual airline will be granted its allowance based on traffic recorded two years before the trading period, scheduled to start in 2011.
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Airlines are advised to cut emissions regardless of the EC's decision |
Speaking last week at the Sustainable Aviation 2007 conference in Brussels, Jasper Faber, a senior researcher at CE Delft, the Dutch consultancy that conducted the impact assessment of inclusion in the EC's emissions trading scheme, admitted that "the benchmark is coming under a lot of scrutiny".
Switching the allocation benchmark from RTKs to available seat kilometres (ASK), for example, could take the pressure off struggling traditional carriers, as the RTK measure undoubtedly favours low-cost carriers, running efficient higher seat density fleets at higher load factors.
Europe's member states are commissioning their own studies on how different airline business models would be affected.
Increasing the one-year wait on applying Europe's emission trading regime on all airlines by another year, restricting the provisions exclusively to departing airlines and even increasing the maximum take-off weight of eligible aircraft could be further areas of revision, suggest experts.
While Faber says these issues are coming under scrutiny from the aviation sector and from governments, he says airlines would be wise to prepare a strategic response through lowering emissions by making technical adjustments to the fleet and taking additional operational measures.
He admits that some airlines will lose out. Citing Ireland, where national carrier Aer Lingus and low-cost pioneer Ryanair dominate, he says: "Where there is one major inefficient airline and one major efficient airline there will be movement, but at the end of the day it would be best to leave it to the market to decide."
Professor Peter Morrell at Cranfield Univeristy's Air Transport Department agrees that the use of RTKs will favour those airlines with higher load factors and operating aircraft with higher seat densities. However, he says while the emission regime will provide financial incentives for airlines to apply new technologies, the degree to which airlines can invest to reduce emissions is limited, forcing them to buy permits.
"The emissions trading scheme does not provide a clear long-term price signal while airlines have to plan fleet changes based on longer-term assumptions," he says.
Source: Flight International
