ENTER THE PILOT SHORTAGE
So, which is it? Well, separately, FLYING has reported multiple instances of major airlines saying they’d park hundreds of airplanes and cancel service in many regional areas because they could not recruit the pilots to complete the trips. Even amid lucrative pay increases for pilots in 2022 and this year, many airlines still say they need the workforce to meet the passenger demand, leaving customers in some smaller cities with few or no options. Putting it in that context, the IPS report tends to play fast and loose with the truth, and while some of the narratives are compelling at face value, it is mostly that. Dan Hubbard, NBAA senior vice president for communications, adds even more color. “Many flights conducted by business airplanes are used for humanitarian missions, including those that transport doctors and other first responders to people in need,”
Hubbard pointed out before listing off a series of examples where business aviation departments outside the public eye utilize their aircraft to support their business. “The study not only looks past these key data points but the companies behind them. “For example, the report’s D.C.-based authors may not be familiar with the Pullman, Washington-based company that uses a business airplane to monitor key installations providing power to the region’s electric grid. They may not have spent a day with employees at the Marshall, Minnesota-based company—that town’s largest employer—that relies on its turboprop airplane to reach food-distribution centers dotting small towns across the country. They may never have heard of the Phoenix-based medical company that deploys its airplanes for flights that bring doctors to patients in rural areas without big-city medical specialists.”
FLY MORE—MORE SUSTAINABLY
So, therein lies the rub—at least part of it. Another major argument that external groups have used to critique the use of private aircraft is the most obvious: their carbon footprint. Now it is true that private aircraft users typically fly more than the general public. This said, higher frequency of air travel makes private aircraft a more efficient use of their time. It is easy then to make a slanted argument that these travelers drive more pollution, as the ISP report puts forward, but does that assertion hold up? In its rebuttal, NBAA said the ISP report’s “most glaring factual omission involves business aviation’s legacy of achievements in sustainable flight, which have been adopted across the industry.” Aside from business aircraft being proven more fuel efficient than commercial transport category jets, in 2022, supported by the federally mandated Inflation Reduction Act set up to boost the production of sustainable aviation fuels, the business aviation sector led the adoption of SAF over commercial operators. Despite the limited availability and higher costs for SAF, the business travel community is spurring production by essentially subsidizing it through book-and-claim purchases. Moreover, operators and management
companies have established carbon-offset programs that users and customers can tap into. “Simply put, business aviation has been a test bed for technologies that reduce the sector’s carbon footprint and pave the way for realizing the established goal of achieving net-zero emissions from business aircraft by 2050,” Hubbard said. There are still other arguments the ISP report made. While they appealed to the extremes, it is clear that as business aviation is increasingly having its moment in the sun, there will be more scrutiny and calls for intervention, with much at stake. One of the most enduring business figures, Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger, in a 1995 speech titled “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” at Harvard University, honed in on the power of incentives to drive change. To be clear, negative incentives can also do that, and if the ISP’s stick-over-carrot version were to prevail, it would be easy to undo decades of progress that business aviation has achieved for the industry. On the other hand, a carrot-first approach has only caused us to lean toward innovation in hopes of grasping a cleaner, quieter future—so why stop now?
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