Speaking during Abta’s Decarbonising Tourism webinar on Thursday (11 November), the group’s programme director Andy Jefferson explained the challenge facing the industry is how quickly it can deliver new technologies such as hydrogen and electric-power, which he said were some 10 years away from a "major" scale-up.
"There are challenges going forward, clearly, as decarbonising aviation is really hard," Jefferson said. "We are one of the hardest sectors to decarbonise, but there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make that happen, but also an absolute commitment across the industry. We are absolutely moving in the right direction."
He said one issue in delivering "jet zero", an initiative launched by the UK government to achieve net-zero carbon emissions for the industry, was removing the "barriers to progress".
By way of an example, Jefferson raised the transition to sustainable aviation fuel (SAF). "From a UK point of view, we think we can have 14 plans producing sustainable fuels by 2035," he said, adding three of these could be up and running by 2025. "One of the barriers is getting the policies right that incentivise capital investment to build those plants here in the UK," he stressed.
Jefferson also said delivering sustainable solutions for travel and aviation is "very much a collaboration" between the industry, governments, the private sector, innovators and academics
Additionally, Sustainable Aviation is calling for pre-published flight routes to be replaced by a "free route airspace", which will allow airlines to fly their preferred trajectory between a defined entry and exit point to improve efficiency and reduce flight time, fuel burn and emissions.
Earlier, the webinar heard from a panel of industry leaders, who warned all travel companies would soon need "robust" sustainability strategies, adding just campaigning on these issues wouldn’t be enough.
