The aviation industry cannot simply sit back and wait for governments to provide more airports to cope with the inevitable expansion of traffic
With perfect timing, the dawning of flight's second century - marked with a flourish in Kitty Hawk last week - appears to coincide with the glimmerings of a real recovery in aerospace. With luck, any nascent recovery will not flounder like Wednesday's attempt to re-enact the first flight with a replica of the Wrights' machine.
New years are always a time for optimism, often misplaced. Both January 2002 and 2003 proved false dawns after the terrible impact of 11 September 2001. This time, however, the cautious confidence seems for real. The upbeat last quarter economic performance in the USA; the bullishness of Gulf carriers at the Dubai air show; the faster-than-expected post-SARS recovery of Asia's airlines; even the capture of Saddam Hussein: a slew of positive indicators is giving the industry hope that the first months of 2004 might mark the start of a sustained upswing.
The publication of the UK government's blueprint for expanding airport capacity last week was a reminder that, however painful managing the downturn has been, the real challenge facing the industry and governments from now is going to be coping with growth in demand. The good news is that more people wanting to fly means potentially busier production lines, more jobs and happy shareholders in aerospace businesses. The bad news is that, in countries such as the UK, that burgeoning demand is likely to increasingly hit the concrete wall of lack of capacity, environmental opposition and added costs.
Thankfully, the UK government has in its White Paper come down on the side of aviation and the national interest rather than caving in to the increasingly vociferous environmental lobby and the country's homeowning "nimbys" (who are all for development, only "not in my back yard"). It has acknowledged - at least in part - that the country's economic prospects in the 21st century depend on it having enough airport capacity around its capital city to allow London to compete for international business against not just Paris and Amsterdam, but New York, Hong Kong and Dubai. Throughout history, every prosperous city - from Venice to Babylon - has relied on transport links for its wealth. But the choice of Stansted, rather than Heathrow, for the first new runway has pleased low-cost leisure carriers such as Ryanair - which is based there - rather more than British Airways, BMI British Midland and Virgin Atlantic, who are desperate for capacity at the city's congested main airport.
And while publishing a White Paper is one thing, actually building the infrastructure the UK needs will be much harder thanks to complicated planning laws and a small but highly effective band of hardline green guerillas. When builders moved in to construct Manchester's second runway in the mid-1990s, they were delayed for months by tunnel-digging protesters. The go-ahead for a new terminal at Heathrow came only after a decade-long inquiry process. It is possible that a group of determined villagers in Essex could slow down Stansted's expansion for years by taking to the courts. Heathrow's eventual third runway may be blocked not by pollution caused by aircraft but by the government's inability to constrain car traffic around its perimeter by charging for road use.
Rather than simply shouting from the sidelines for more capacity, the industry - airlines and manufacturers alike - must work harder on its image, working with, rather than against, governments. Like the car industry has done successfully, aviation must acknowledge that there is a downside to air travel and huge dilemmas to be confronted in managing its growth. But it must also continue to convince public opinion that the benefits - from cheaper holidays to opening faster trade and business routes around the world - together with the strides being made in making engines quieter and cleaner and managing airspace more effectively and safely make expanding the sector not only possible but a vital national objective for any country.
The second century of powered flight will not see the dramatic technological step changes witnessed in the first 100 years. There will, at some stage, be another supersonic passenger aircraft and airliners that can carry 1,000 passengers non-stop to anywhere in the world. But unless the industry can find a way of convincing more people that more aircraft in the skies is a positive not a negative, then overcrowded airports in the UK and elsewhere could find themselves descending into gridlock.
Source: Flight International
