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While aviation Europe is meeting in Toulouse to talk about decarbonization, Guillaume Faury, the boss of Airbus, gives us his roadmap to make commercial aviation less polluting.
While waiting for the hydrogen plane, announced for 2035, the aircraft manufacturer is counting in particular on a rapid renewal of fleets and on the creation of a sector for the production of sustainable fuels.
Gathered in the capital of aeronautics, the Ministers of Transport of the European Union must make this Friday "the declaration of Toulouse" and commit to implementing the industrial sectors to achieve sustainable aviation by 2050. Innovations, hydrogen aircraft, sustainable fuels, Guillaume Faury, the boss of Airbus, reveals to
20 Minutes
the strategy of the aircraft manufacturer to fly greener, in the immediate future and in the decades to come.
Do you think that aeronautics in general and Airbus are off the hook after the earthquake of the health crisis?
We are not out of the woods, but the worst is behind us.
In any case, that's what we think and that's what we hope.
Let's say we're on a trajectory back to some normalcy.
Will the normal situation after Covid be the same as before?
Probably not.
We also see that long-distance international traffic will take a long time to return to a more or less normal situation, rather around 2024-2025, in particular because there are different ways of managing Covid-19 around the world.
Aren't you afraid that the duration of the crisis has changed the perception of air travel?
No, that's not what the airlines and numbers tell us.
It's quite the opposite in fact.
Demand remains very strong, even stronger than before in all that is tourism and family visits.
People haven't traveled for two years, sometimes they haven't seen their loved ones, their families for two years, they want to fly back very, very quickly, as soon as they can.
On the business flight, on the other hand, we think that we will probably never return to the situation before.
Because awareness of CO2 emissions, at least for a number of years, will impact company policies and also because we have all learned to work differently with digital.
But there is no renunciation of theft because of the Covid.
He also has this rising music, this “ashamed to fly”, the flygskam, does that worry you?
It was a very strong movement just before the Covid, which is still very localized geographically.
He also came from Sweden, where on average we steal five times more per year and per inhabitant than the average European.
And basically, it's a fairly healthy debate, but one that shouldn't blind us to figures and facts.
When it was created, there was a feeling in the population that the CO2 emissions of the air were unreasonable.
And this is not the case?
Actually no.
Aviation represents 2.5% of CO2 emissions in the world and when you travel with a modern plane, you consume two liters of fuel per 100 km and per passenger, that is to say much less than by car. .
These figures are beginning to be known and this is a very good thing, because it helps put this shame of stealing into perspective.
But we cannot be satisfied with that and at Airbus, we are absolutely determined to transform aviation so that carbon is no longer a subject.
It has become our priority and we are convinced that the plane is the means of transport of the future.
In the end, was the Covid, by accelerating this transition, not a blessing in disguise?
When we entered the Covid, we went into survival mode in this industry.
It was considered in March-April 2020 that our industry could suffer irreparable damage, such was the severity and brutality of the crisis.
And so, we began to drastically reduce all expenses, including for preparing for the future.
Then we said to ourselves that, even in a situation of serious crisis, it was necessary to maintain certain critical investments, in particular those on decarbonization.
I often tell my teams that you should never spoil a crisis and the Covid crisis has been a kind of catalyst for actions in favor of the decarbonization of air transport.
Indeed, I think that when we look at the health crisis with hindsight, we will realize that it was a positive element because we were in a very serious crisis and we put all the players around the table to find solutions.
We probably gained a few years.
Climate experts all say that in 2035, the date announced for the entry into service of your carbon-free plane, it will already be too late...
Of course he doesn't wait until 2035. Our battle plan is multi-pronged and there are two that are immediate. First, we have enormously improved the consumption of aircraft in recent years and therefore the CO2 emissions per passenger transported. However, only 13% of the world fleet uses new generation aircraft. So the first way to reduce CO2 emissions from commercial aviation is to take old planes out of service and replace them with modern planes that consume less fuel. It's happening right now, every plane we're delivering is replacing an old plane.
The second thing is that every aircraft we deliver right now is already certified for 50% sustainable fuels.
It's a bit like every plane we deliver is a plug-in hybrid.
Sustainable fuels can reduce CO2 emissions by up to 90% compared to a fossil fuel.
The problem is that airlines today use this capacity very little.
Why do companies use it so little?
Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs) are not available in sufficient quantities.
The short-term priority – and on which we agree with our main competitor Boeing – is to ramp up the production of carbon-free fuels.
For that you need a lot of carbon-free energy, and in particular green electricity.
The real subject is that of energy transformation.
There is a third immediate solution, which is not in our hands but in those of the authorities, and that is the optimization of air traffic.
There is a very big job to make the flights much simpler and more direct.
We are still talking about a possibility of savings of about 10%.
Is the hydrogen plane really the most promising avenue?
This is the last part of the transition, the most exciting, because hydrogen puts no carbon back into the air, but also the most difficult.
Hydrogen is the solution for the 22nd or 23rd century, it's the solution for the long term, and we want to be ready for 2035.
The most skeptical also say that it is a technical solution that cannot be transposed to long-haul, the most polluting…
This is true in the short term.
We will start with short-haul as aviation a century ago started with short-haul – because you need a lot of space to store hydrogen on board an aircraft.
As technology and aircraft evolve, there is every reason to believe that medium and long-haul aircraft may one day be replaced by hydrogen-powered aircraft.
But as of today, it is the SAFs that will allow us to decarbonize long-haul flights.
Our dossier on Airbus
A report by the Supaéro Décarbo collective maintains that technological innovations or the renewal of fleets will not be sufficient to limit emissions from the aviation sector by the end of the century, which will require a drop in traffic.
What inspires you?
Our collective problem is carbon.
But don't get the order of priority wrong.
The subject that is at the heart of all decarbonization, in the air industry as in all other sectors, is energy transformation.
Afterwards, we can decide that we stop air transport, or cars, that we stop feeding people, building buildings, putting energy into digital, digital, computing centers and servers, which represent 4 to 5% of CO2 emissions, soon twice as much as air travel.
Everyone acts as if it is not the case, but these are facts, figures.
We are absolutely convinced that aviation is part of the solution.
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