PLANES with bird-like wings that change shape. Unpiloted passenger jets of awesomely vast capacity. Flying cars! Sceptics will roll their eyes at many of the visions of the future of flight that are now gracing designers鈥� screens (see 鈥淭he shape of wings to come鈥�). But the important question to ask is this: even if these grand designs get off the ground, will they solve the number one aviation problem of the 21st century?
Forty years ago the bugbears of commercial jet travel were a patchy safety record and social elitism borne of high ticket prices. Today, the towering problem is environmental damage. If current trends continue, passenger-kilometres flown globally will treble by 2030. London鈥檚 Heathrow today handles some 60 million passengers a year; by 2050 airports in the UK will be serving 1 billion passengers a year. Cue ever more cargo aircraft carrying ever more freight. Ever more noise. Ever more runways.
And above all, ever more emissions. The perception that plane fuel will only ever account for a small proportion of the greenhouse gas problem is a myth. The UK鈥檚 Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, author of one of the world鈥檚 most respected investigations of the problem, calculates that by 2050 greenhouse pollution from other sources is likely to have fallen, leaving soaring aviation accounting for nearly 75 per cent of the UK鈥檚 greenhouse impact.
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Can better aircraft design help? The aircraft industry will continue to improve fuel efficiency and cut noise. In Europe, industry bodies have set ambitious targets for reducing CO2 and noise emissions by up to 50 per cent by 2020 and nitrogen oxides by up to 80 per cent. The bad news is that these targets are purely voluntary and will offset only part of the increase in air travel even if they are met.
More striking innovations such as seating passengers inside giant 鈥渇lying wings鈥� would create lighter 鈥� and greener 鈥� planes prone to much less drag. But such designs could take decades to develop and will only suit big long-haul aircraft; the greatest threat is from short-haul flights. Other revolutionary approaches, such as wing-morphing, are even further off.
In short, there is no single technological fix anywhere near. Governments will have to step in if they want to limit the damage. Next week鈥檚 Aviation White Paper in the UK is likely to be a missed opportunity that others would do well to ignore. But there are policies worth considering 鈥� incentives for shifting freight from air to rail or sea, for example. And why should aviation fuel be exempt from any emissions trading schemes and from the taxes levied on fuel for cars and trains? The first hundred years of flight have been inspiring. But we鈥檙e into the second hundred now, and it鈥檚 time the unfair privileges were removed.