Author: George Hibberd, Safe Landing co-founder, former easyJet pilot
Today, easyJet celebrates 30 years in the sky. Louise Parry of the BBC ran a piece outlining the origins of the low-cost airline and the journey it has been on from then until now as one of Europe’s leading low-cost airlines. As one of Safe Landing’s co-founders and having worked as an airline pilot for easyJet I was asked to critique easyJet’s net zero pathway.
You can read the BBC article here.
Flying is a true gift
In it I highlight that aviation has connected cultures all around the world, it’s a true gift, something Safe Landing is clear to underline in our work – we love flying. But we also recognise the current impact that aviation has on our climate needs to reduce if we are to preserve the beauty of flight for generations to come.
Efficiencies are going up, but so are emissions
easyJet’s net zero plan shows a graph with a downward angled line, which to the average person would look like easyjet’s emissions going down from now until 2050. But in small text next to the Y-axis if you look carefully it actually denotes emissions intensity (i.e. the emissions per passenger per flight). So, in essence, the airline plans to get more efficient, something every airline strives to achieve for commercial reasons, not for sustainability reasons. I showed Louise Parry that actually easyJet’s absolute emissions, like every other airline that wants to succeed, will actually be highly to increase by at least 25% in the next 30 years due to the expansion of the industry and number of flights.
The net zero plan relies not just on the increased efficiency of aircraft, which is actually levelling off over time (see graph below), but also the efficiency of airspace through modernisation. They claim it could reduce emissions by 10%, but a Destination 2050 report shows that a more conservative estimate of 6% is more accurate. Again, this efficiency will be outstripped by airline growth.
Sustainable Aviation Fuels
On so-called ‘Sustainable Aviation Fuels’ I also showed Louise Parry the Transport & Environment (T&E) study showing that at the most optimistic emissions savings from SAF would barely cancel out growth in energy demand from the aviation sector. Kerosene use could still be as high as in 2023 in 2049. T&E’s SAF observatory puts easyJet joint 27-39th out of 100 companies when it comes to SAF usage and commitments.
Hydrogen flight and non-CO2
Hydrogen flight and carbon capture is heavily relied on by the net zero plan. Meanwhile Airbus’s ZEROe project has pushed delivery of the first hydrogen powered aircraft back from 2035 to the late 2040’s. Similarly, carbon capture has yet to be proven at any scale.
The plan makes little mention of the non-CO2 impacts of flight, only that it needs more investigation. In reality, non-CO2 impacts, such as nitrogen oxides and contrails, have shown to increase the heating impact of aviation by 2-3 times.
Change needs to be systemic – workers need a voice
What you won’t see in the article is that I made sure to say that easyJet isn’t an outlier. Most airlines have very similar net zero plans based on speculative technology and highly optimistic scenarios. Highly optimistic means extremely high risk for the climate and for us as aviation workers.
Change in the industry needs to be systemic and come from government and from regulators. It also needs to be driven by the voices of grassroots workers. There is stacks of passion, expertise and experience in the industry that is currently under-utilised and pushing the industry in the wrong direction. We can harness all that energy and give workers a voice through Workers’ Assemblies.
We held our latest assembly in September where aviation workers from across the sector co-created a positive, worker-led vision for the future of aviation. You can read more about that here. Watch this space for the full report!