To customers, investors and airlines, an earthbound existence was unimaginable before the coronavirus. For commercial aviation, the past two decades have been a period of superheated growth. In 1998, airlines sold 1.46bn tickets for one kind of flight or another. By 2019, that number had shot up to 4.54bn. This year has undone it all. Early in March, the International Air Transport Association (Iata) published two potential scenarios. The more extreme one forecast a global loss of revenue of $113bn. By mid-April, about 14,400 passenger planes around the world – 65% of the global fleet – had been placed into storage, according to the aviation research firm Cirium. Companies that have been brought to the brink, or in some cases collapsed entirely, include Virgin Australia and Virgin Atlantic, Flybe in the UK, South African Airways, LATAM and Avianca in South America, Compass and Trans States in the US. Airlines for America, a trade group, calculated that the last time the US averaged fewer than 100,000 daily passengers was in 1954. Emirates became so desperate for passengers that it promised to shell out $1,765 for a funeral if anyone died of Covid-19 after flying with them. [...]
Last year, KLM unveiled an initiative that sounded like a plea for less business. “Do you always need to meet face to face? Could you take the train instead?” a voiceover in an advert asked. “We all have to fly every now and then. But next time, think about flying responsibly.” (“There was a little bit of bravery in that,” a KLM executive told me. “It had to be pitched to the board three times before they approved it.”) The ad, bold as it was, also fit a broader pattern. As ever, individuals are being requested to tame their habits of consumption, even while governments and large corporations do far less than they might to curb their expenditure of carbon. At the same time, we’re assured by airline companies that our self-restraint has to be only temporary, and that some technological salvation – a plane running on batteries or hydrogen – will let us return to our habits very soon. [...]
But the true leaps in efficiency were achieved by new craft, which airlines began to request from manufacturers in the early 00s. The Boeing 787, for example, claims to burn 20% less fuel than its older sibling, the 767. Van Hooff recalled how, when KLM inducted its first 787 into its fleet in 2015, a pilot accustomed to the 747 was appointed to fly it to Dubai. “The 747 is beautiful, but it burns around 11,000 kilos of fuel per hour on a trip like this, so he was used to seeing around 100,000 kilos on his storage gauge when he got into the cockpit,” Van Hooff said. “This time, he saw 50,000. He put in a call to dispatch to ask: ‘Are you really sure this is enough?’ Of course, he knew it was. But he couldn’t get past his gut feeling that he needed more fuel.”
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