Abstract
Aviation sustainability and GHG emissions reduction are academic and social trending topics. Air transport intensive energy use together with its constant pre-pandemic growth and the difficulties to evolve towards non-carbon-based energy paradigms, conform an environmentally “worrying frame”. Emissions reduction initiatives comprise aircraft technology and operation improvements, tax schemes, compensation and trading, efficient infrastructures, and sustainable aviation fuels. All of them have been subject of extensive academic analysis. Aspects that have been almost neglected in this analysis are the personal motivation and commitment from air transport stakeholders to pursue longer term technology developments towards sustainable energy paradigms. This paper explores those aspects by using a novel methodology where experts were interviewed prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (2017-2018) and during the pandemic (summer 2021), aiming at exploring the evolution of their beliefs regarding aviation sustainability, focusing in the expectations regarding aviation energy paradigm changes. Additionally, a survey was run among professionals of the aviation and energy sectors performing a quantitative analysis, triangulated with the interviews’ results. Aviation professionals keep relying on air traffic recovery and growth despite the COVID crisis. They are also conscious of the difficulties of the sector to enact the application of emissions reduction technologies and policies. However, there is not consensus in the strategies with the highest potential, although some tendencies have been identified: whilst enthusiasm about aircraft electrification has cooled down, a higher degree of reliance is put in new engine architectures. Fiscal measures are either poorly valued or not well understood. Aviation should leverage the consensus on new engine architectures to achieve tangible emissions contention in the mid-term, increase efforts to improve and explain emissions trading and compensation schemes, keep developing new technologies to unveil their real potential, and manage social expectations realistically, stressing its social and economic sustainability dimensions.
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