Flying shame: the scandalous rise of private jets
Last week, Rishi Sunak flew from London to Blackpool –
his third private jet trip in 10 days. He’s far from the only one using air
travel for short journeys. Just how much damage is this doing?
Emine Saner
@eminesaner
Thu 26 Jan
2023 06.00 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/26/flying-shame-the-scandalous-rise-of-private-jets
It was a
Labour spokesperson who said the prime minister was behaving “like an A-list
celeb”, after Rishi Sunak made his third trip by private jet in 10 days. Last
week, he flew from London to Blackpool in a 14-seat RAF jet – a 230-mile
journey that would have taken about three hours by train. The week before, he
did the same to Leeds, which he could have done in two and a half hours by
train, but which wouldn’t have looked nearly so glamorous – to go by the
ludicrous photograph of him looking important and being saluted as he boarded
the aircraft.
Private
planes are up to 14 times more polluting, per passenger, than commercial planes
and 50 times more polluting than trains, according to a report by Transport
& Environment, a European clean transport campaign organisation. “It goes
against the fact that the government has committed to net zero by 2050,” says
Alice Ridley, a spokesperson for the Campaign for Better Transport. “They have
said they want to see more journeys by public transport, walking and cycling.
Taking a private jet is extremely damaging for the environment, especially when
there are other alternatives that would be far less polluting and would also be
cheaper.”
Private planes carry far fewer passengers, while about
40% of flights are empty, simply getting the aircraft to the right location.
Flying short distances also means planes are less fuel-efficient.
“A private
jet is the most polluting form of transport you can take,” says Matt Finch, the
UK policy manager for Transport & Environment. “The average private jet
emits two tonnes of carbon an hour. The average European is responsible for
[emitting] eight tonnes of carbon a year. You fly to the south of France and
back, that’s half a year in one trip.”
Transport
& Environment says the UK is the biggest private jet polluter in Europe,
accounting for nearly 20% of emissions, followed by France (although the US
accounts for the vast majority of all private jet flights). While there has
been a slowing after the highs that were seen during Covid, when the wealthiest
turned to private jets when commercial carriers shut down – or to avoid crowds
at airports – levels of private jet travel are still higher than before the
pandemic, and many companies are reporting growth.
“Since
September last year, we’ve seen a 10% to 15% decline compared to the previous
year,” says Richard Koe, the managing director of WINGX, the private-aviation
data analysts. “But if you look at January 2023, it’s a little bit more than
10% above where it was in January 2019. That’s some solid growth.”
A study
last year for Airbus Corporate Jets found that 65% of the large US companies
interviewed regularly used private jets; one-third had started during the
pandemic and nearly three-quarters said they planned to use private jets more
in the next two years. Last year was a record year for sales of private
aircraft. Clearly, despite environmental concerns, there is still substantial
interest – in less than two weeks’ time, a global private-aviation conference
is being held in London.
Private
aviation is, says Koe, “a really immature industry that caters to a tiny
proportion of very wealthy people”. But private jets are becoming more
accessible. Some charter companies will allow you to book a seat on an “empty
leg” – a repositioning flight, or the plane returning to base after a one-way
flight – for much less than the cost of chartering your own jet. Chartering a
plane from the UK to the south of France, for instance, costs in the region of
£13,000. All of this, warned a Transport & Environment report, is likely to
be hooking new customers, normalising this form of luxury travel and increasing
demand.
“Once you
take your first private flight, you don’t want to do anything else,” says Kenny
Dichter, the chief executive and chair of Wheels Up, a US-based private
aviation company. “The convenience, ease and level of service are hard to top.”
In the UK,
private jets tend to use small, private airports, mostly concentrated around
London, such as Biggin Hill and Farnborough – from there, it is a short
helicopter ride into the capital. Dichter says: “While flying private is
certainly a splurge, it’s not solely the province of the super-wealthy.”
They might
be people who are booking a special trip, or adventure travellers “looking for
the next big thrill in a hard-to-reach location”. His business clients, he
says, have found that “the time saved by flying private helps them get more
done, see more of their clients and employees and build their businesses”.
How
sensitive are they to criticisms about the increased emissions from private
aviation? “It’s certainly something that’s of growing importance across the
industry,” says Dichter, who says they are looking at ways to reduce their
carbon emissions “through the use of sustainable and alternative fuels”,
although there is no prominent mention on their website of an environmental
plan.
The
super-rich largely seem immune to flight-shaming, although they are more
sensitive to privacy issues. Social media users, using publicly available
flight data, have been tracking celebrities and business people and publicising
each flight, along with its carbon impact. Of the jets tracked by the account
CelebJets, the plane owned by Taylor Swift was found to have made the most
flights, emitting more than 8,000 tonnes of carbon. (A spokesperson for the
singer denied that Swift was on every flight, saying her plane is loaned out to
others.) The boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr was next, followed by Jay-Z. The
Canadian rapper Drake, meanwhile, owns a Boeing 767 – a commercial-scale
airliner.
In
December, Elon Musk suspended the CelebJets Twitter account, along with ElonJet
– both run by a coding student, Jack Sweeney – which tracked his own private
jet. ElonJet has since returned to Twitter, but no longer tracks Musk’s jet in
real time (although it does on Sweeney’s Instagram account). Musk, meanwhile,
has put in an order for a Gulfstream jet, according to reports. Bernard Arnault,
the chief executive of the luxury group LVMH, sold his private plane to avoid
scrutiny. “The result now is that no one can see where I go, because I rent
planes when I use private planes,” he said in a radio interview last year.
One common
justification for the use of private jets – often euphemistically called
business jets – is that they are critical to the efficient functioning of big
business, and therefore economies, but that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, says
Finch. “The misconception is that it’s business people flying to do massive
deals, which are going to change the course of an organisation and raise 10,000
people’s wages,” he says. “That’s just not true.”
Transport
& Environment’s report found that, in Europe, private jet usage peaks in
summer, with some of the most popular airports being Nice and Ibiza. Finch
says: “Either there’s all of a sudden a lot of business deals happening in
August around Nice, or …” A wry pause. “It’s really hard to say they’re going
to Ibiza for business.”
The other
justification is that private jets account for only 2% of all aviation
emissions, but environmental campaigners point out that the sector is growing,
many flights are unnecessary and the journey could be done by a commercial
carrier or by train, and that private jet use undermines the message the rest
of us get about cutting emissions.
What would
Finch like to see happen to curb the rise of private jet travel? “First, no jet
fuel is taxed, although the EU have just put proposals in place. But, for me,
start taxing private jet fuel tomorrow. These guys can afford it; the average
private jet owner is a billionaire. You have to pay fuel duty when you put
petrol in your car – why doesn’t someone who flies a private jet around have to
pay fuel duty?”
Ridley
would like to see increased air passenger duty (APD) for private jet
passengers. “They’re not being asked to pay extra for the privilege of flying
by private jet,” she says. At the end of last year, the Campaign for Better
Transport called for a “super” APD tax on private jet passengers, calculating
that it could raise about £1.4bn each year. “We’d like to see that money that
the taxation raised go towards public transport, which would benefit more
people.”
But, in a
strange way, the people flying in these polluting machines could be the ones to
accelerate greener air travel, argues Finch. Private jet users are “the ones
who can afford to innovate. At the moment, we’ve got test electric and
hydrogen-fuel-cell planes in existence. There was a 19-seater
hydrogen-fuel-cell plane last week that flew over the skies of England.
Progress is happening [and they are becoming] more ready for commercial use.”
Private
jets – because they are smaller and fly shorter distances – are particularly
suited to this new technology. It would take only a few billionaires putting
orders in to get the market moving, Finch says. So, should we be grateful,
then, to private jet users? It seems a stretch. Finch says: “At the moment,
there is no mechanism to force private jet buyers to buy, or even to consider,
zero-emission aircraft.”
How
sensitive is the sector to criticism about its environmental impact? “It’s
quite different in the US than Europe,” says Koe. “In Europe, the industry is
super-sensitive to it. At most of the networking events and conferences, you
find sustainability as the top item on the agenda: how the industry can
respond, how it can mitigate, how it can innovate.”
In the past
quarter, Victor, a private air charter company based in the UK, saw a 5%
increase in bookings from new clients. Since June last year, all Victor flights
have offered sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), a biofuel often made from waste
products such as cooking oil. The company previously offset flights, but now
says SAF is its focus.
“I have the
role as co-CEO of an on-demand private jet business and I care about the
environment, and therefore I’m using my position, hopefully, to show what is
possible,” says Toby Edwards of Victor. “There’s absolutely a cohort of our
customers who want to do whatever they can when booking an aircraft to reduce
their carbon emissions, and buying sustainable aviation fuel is a far better
choice for private flyers than offsets.”
Edwards
says one in five of his customers choose SAF when booking; the company’s
internal target is to get that to one in four. Others are more critical – SAF
will have absorbed carbon over its lifecycle, but it is not totally
carbon-neutral, due to the energy required to refine and transport it. Also,
when a plane uses it, it delivers CO2 to the atmosphere in the same way fossil
fuels do.
As it
stands, the private jet craze shows little sign of abating. This month, a
service was launched by a British company offering private jets for pets, after
noticing how many requests it was getting from people wanting to bring their
cat or dog on board. Adam Golder founded G6 Aviation in 2021, to offer private
air travel to wealthy people who had been grounded by the pandemic, many of
whom have continued to fly privately. “You can get somewhere on your own
schedule within a day and be back home,” he says. “Everything’s bespoke around
your trip. If you want to do several cities in a day, you can.”
G6’s
pay-per-seat service, K9 Jets, hopes to run its first flight between New Jersey
and London in April. Its flights can take up to 10 people and 10 dogs (depending
on the size of the dog), says Golder. G6 has had 2,000 people express interest
in the past few weeks. Golder is not expecting seats to be booked by the
super-rich; they might be people who are relocating from the US to Europe and
are willing to pay about £8,750 for a seat out of, for instance, the proceeds
of their house sale. “There’s been quite a lot of stories about mishaps
happening when people’s pets are in cargo,” says Golder. “People are more than
ever willing to spend more and fly with their pets on a private jet.”
To
environmental groups, however, this is another symptom of the gaping disconnect
between the desire for exclusive luxury travel and the urgent reality of the
climate crisis. “We’re talking decades before we’re looking at the kind of
[aviation] technology that could solve the climate issue,” says Ridley. “At the
moment, there’s no way to reduce climate emissions from aviation other than
flying less.”
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