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Business aviation insiders may be forgiven for thinking that sustainability already dominates much of the sector’s available bandwidth.
According to one company well positioned to hear from a wide cross section of the industry, too many of these discussions prioritize optimistic, and often fuzzily indistinct, future aspirations over the important, clearly defined details of what can and should be being done right now.
“What I’ve been surprised at is the frustration of people in the industry who have been assigned sustainability as their task of not having an honest conversation,” says Heather Gordon, legal director of Martyn Fiddler Aviation. The company, based in the Isle of Man, provides specialist tax and customs advice to aircraft owners. It has published a report, an attempt to take the sector’s collective pulse on the main shared challenges it is facing today, which Gordon has written.
The report reflects what the company is hearing from the broad cross section of people it deals with, both as part of its ongoing business, and in connection with the Isle of Man Aviation Conference it holds each year. Too many people in the sector, Gordon suggests, like to highlight obvious positives, and ignore equally obvious challenges. This is particularly true at trade shows and conferences, where, often, the content of presentations will need to be signed off in advance by companies. Co-ordinated responses to external critics, managed by trade associations, have to go through multiple committees, so take a long time to progress. The result is a lack of substance and timeliness to the ever-increasing amount of sector-wide discussion.
“I’m only a spokesperson for myself,” Gordon says. “I’ve got approval from my business to talk to you, but I can’t speak for anybody else. And I think that’s possibly the problem that business aviation has. You’ve got lots of little voices, but the joining-up of those voices just seems to be almost impossible, because everyone’s got a different thought about it.”
The Martyn Fiddler report, State of the Industry: Business Aviation in 2024, addresses supply chain issues and industry consolidation, but sustainability and the sector’s response to the climate crisis are central. Gordon acknowledges that industry insiders, feeling themselves being turned into scapegoats for wider issues by climate protesters, will understandably respond defensively.
However, she argues, this may not be the most helpful position to adopt if the end goal is to persuade the wider world that the industry is sincere about reducing emissions.
She recalls a panel discussion at February’s Corporate Jet Investor conference in London, in which climate activists were heckled by the audience.
“I vehemently disagreed with a lot of what they [the activists on the panel] were saying—however, they had the guts to stand up on their stage and give their perspective,” she says. “They’re completely entitled to their opinion: if we haven’t been clear enough in our messaging, that’s our fault, not their fault.”
The report flags a major risk if the sector is unable to present a unified and environmentally proactive face to the wider world. “The ‘quick win’ mentality of many politicians is likely to turn a blind eye on to the benefits of business aviation and focus on easy mass votes,” it says. “The challenge will be for business aviation to stand fast, actively communicate its message and maintain its evolutionary path for a cleaner climate future.”
The first step toward achieving this is having more honest conversations—not just with people outside the sector, but internally, too. Part of this will involve acknowledging when critics may have a point, part will need some coordination to ensure the industry’s public perception does not appear to be hypocritical, and part may require giving up some long-relied-on figures that appear to have passed their use-by date.
“We seem to keep clinging to the statistic that we’re only 2% of 2%: it doesn’t matter—we’re still an amount, and we still need to do something about it,” Gordon says. “Other industries are reducing their carbon footprint quicker than we are. Therefore, it’s no longer a worthwhile statistic to keep bandying around.”
The report was published in April, and EBACE will be the first time Gordon will be at a major industry event and able to speak with people about it in person. How is she expecting it to be received?
“My gut feeling is that people’s reaction will be, ‘Well, I’m glad you said it. I mean, I couldn’t say it because of my position,’” she says. “I hope I get a positive reaction. I think I’ll get a positive reaction. But I would dislike it if everyone just agreed with me. What I want is to enter into a bit of a debate. My preference is to say something, and then somebody go, ‘Ooh, but have you thought about this?’ And then you actually build, and you create something out of that. The more people who think, ‘This is my idea as well,’ you build willpower from that, and that then changes people.”
State of the Industry: Business Aviation in 2024 can be downloaded here.
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