DAVID LEARMOUNT/ OPERATIONS AND SAFETY EDITOR
The green lobby is gaining ground in Europe
The deliberations of the UK government, which has just announced its intentions to permit carefully judged and painfully argued airport expansion, are probably the best environmental temperature check the industry in the developed economies will get for some time. In a small, densely populated nation with a successful - so far - airline industry, transport minister Alistair Darling has made clear that the government does not intend to break European regulations on air quality to build a third runway at London Heathrow, which UK and foreign airlines desperately want to see.
Within limits
Knowing, however, that expansion at Heathrow has been judged the best single move from the UK plc point of view, he has voiced hopes that aviation technology will reduce noise and pollution sufficiently so that Heathrow may, in 10 years or more, get a third runway without breaking European air quality limits. Meanwhile the desperately needed UK South East additional runway is to be built at Stansted as soon as possible - the British and foreign major airlines' least favourite choice of location, but located in relatively unpopulous countryside compared with Heathrow and Gatwick airports.
This is the kind of political breast-beating to which all new airport development in Europe is going to be subjected from now on. Even the normally tolerant French populace - in a country twice as large as the UK with a similar population - showed signs of taking to the barricades the last time the French government mentioned the possibility of another Paris airport.
Meanwhile, sparsely populated southern Germany is prepared to increase the risk of approach accidents at Switzerland's Zurich international airport - which is close to the border with Germany - by barring approaches to the main runway after 21:00. One such fatal accident has already occurred and Germany is sticking to its guns. Amsterdam Schiphol has been forced to adopt a policy of choosing the runway in use according to which is the least populous approach path, rather than according to wind direction - until the wind gets close to aircraft crosswind limits.
None of this is going to reverse, and all the signs are of stricter attitudes to come. Most of the really feared environmental sanctions will not hit the airlines for a few years yet, however. Outrage that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change entirely exempted airlines is being publicly expressed, and both environmental pressure groups and the green public are better informed now on what the issues are. A scientific theory now commonly quoted states that water vapour and carbon dioxide emitted by aircraft directly into the upper atmosphere have twice the effect on climate change they would have if they were surface emissions. If true, the 3% of greenhouse gas emissions attributed to the aviation industry has the effect of being 6% or more.
Taxation threat
Kyoto is not, however, likely to be amended or replaced in the next few years by the significant - if dwindling - number of nations that are still pledged to support it. The other threat from governments and agencies like the European Commission is pollution taxes, either direct on the airlines or via a fuel tax. These will be more difficult to enact without causing havoc in national or regional airline industries if competing countries like, for example, the USA, have no intention of levying such taxes on their own airlines or of allowing other states to levy taxes on them when they fly abroad. This is a minefield around which politicians will be stepping carefully for some time, but they are looking for ways and eventually will find them.
Emissions trading is the favourite bet for airlines faced with Kyoto-inspired limits, but within the airline industry it seems that large and growing carriers with modern, low-pollution fleets can only trade with the relatively small airlines that have yet to update theirs, so it seems they will have to go to other industries to buy the ability to expand. In the meantime they have to hope that air traffic management improvements will allow more efficient total route trajectories despite traffic increases, but those improvements will not arrive in 2004.
Source: Flight International
