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73 comments on The National Aviation Policy: Flight Path to the Future?
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73 comments on The National Aviation Policy: Flight Path to the Future?
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Cameron,
While airline travel using jet aircraft seems the least likely to survive in a post-peak-oil world, while passengers can travel at 3L/100km, that's still better than any ICE vehicle with one occupant.
I've become less convinced over time that airlines will die off in a post peak world.
If we (as I hope) convert most ground based transport to electric vehicles, then a combination of biofuels and remnant oil production should be sufficient to keep many planes flying, particularly if they continue to make aircraft more fuel efficient.
Perhaps cheap charter flights for low income earners will be a thing of the past, but I doubt airlines will.
http://peakenergy.blogspot.com/search/label/air%20transport
You're far too optimistic to be an editor here :-)
I think cheap flights can't be sustained (both from a peak oil and climate point of view). Day trips to meetings in London, New York or Sydney from other parts of the same country have to go. As does flying from your weekend home to a workplace somewhere else during the week. Weekend shopping trips 1000km away and bucks weekends on the other side of the continent (whether that's Dublin or Brisbane) are also symptoms of an overconsuming culture.
Occasional big holidays and longer duration business trips, where you can justify the use of valuable fuel and emissions, could survive. But that could be an aviation industry less than one third it's current size. It's only the economists who can't see how to make that happen - just a pity they're still running the show.
I hoping that my optimism is tolerated purely for the sake of editorial diversity - though I do wonder if a virtual lynch mob will one day descend on TOD ANZ and defenestrate me for good :-)
I agree that there is a huge amount of waste associated with what is basically airborne joyriding (something I've been as guilty of as anyone in the past) and that we can do without out it (and no doubt will over time) - but I'm fairly sure the days of business trips and long overseas holidays aren't going to disappear, and neither will the top end of the airline industry.
You're right Gav. Peak Oil won't mean the end of air travel, just the end of *cheap* air travel. Goodbye mass tourism.
Back in the 1930s when a Sydney-London air ticket cost as much as a house, some people still flew. Also in a thinly-populated country like Australia, aviation is a fairly low-infrastructure way to provide transport (compared with say a bullet train line from Sydney to Perth).
One thing that we do have to worry about concerning aviation infrastructure though, Sydney Airport is only one metre above sea-level and will probably become untenable due to global warming within less than the 90 years that have alrady elapsed since it was first founded on the edge of Botany Bay...
Houses were a lot cheaper, though! $2,000-$4,000 was a common range - again, with skilled labourers earning $40 weekly; so a house cost one to two years' wages. Nowadays it's about ten years' wages.
Is the ratio that much different in Australia than the U.S.? Skilled labor in these parts averages about $40-$60 thousand a year, about four times the median house price. Also in the 1930s households didn't have two income earners, add that in and we are down to a modern house (which is a far different product than a thirties house) costing two or three years wages. Not much different than your 1930s number.
I will bet if the ratio of air fare/freight to median first world incomes returns to where it was in the thirties the airline industry will not be a big enough fuel user to warrant much consideration.
On a local note: the refinery here has halved its jet fuel shipments to the regional air cargo hub from 80 railcars a day (for Feb. 2008) to 40 (Feb. 2009) because of the downturn. Jet fuel is one of the most 'practical' ways for Alaska to conveniently deliver a high volume value added product made from its own oil so the manufacture of the product will likely continue here for the foreseeable future. Likely that will have little impact on Australia though.
Which is 2 or 3 years, because that is a 50% increase.
You also seem to think that 40 hours of earnings is "not much different" from 80 hours of earnings - a 100% increase. It is a travesty that it takes two incomes to run an average family household!
The average home now would be 150% to 300% of the physical plant of the average home available in the 30s. The standard 1930s chore load of labor intensive washing and ironing, preparing and cooking all meals from scratch, and labor intensive house cleaning added enough time to the homemakers day beyond what those same chores require today to free up at least an eight hour shift. The well off upper middle class (or lower upper class might be the more accurate term) had housekeepers to handle much of this, working class families handled it all themselves. Women raising the larger families of that time worked no fewer hours then than woman raising families do now.
The running around built into our current lifestyle is what really sucks the time out it, and most of that is brought on by our automobile centric system, the system we built in the glorious 50s and 60s.
A great many of the woman raising smaller families with a more mechanized chore load in the fifties and sixties had worked in the war plants and wanted out of the house and back on the job where they got a paycheck for their efforts. Of course the wage differential put in place by that time made sure their out of the house labor never matched up to the men's income wise so the slippery slope had begun.
Households had very little disposable time or money in the thirties. Its the mid fifies and early sixties post war boom years (in the victorious USA anyway) that are the good old single earner income days-with the perfect June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson kept homes-which are held up as some lost ideal. They were an anomaly not the norm, and we are still suffering from their hangover. Husband and wife teams have traditionally worked very hard except of course for the relative few of the upper crust, like those idle, bored gentlefolk of the Victorian novel who wouldn't stoop to a days labor (god had created the rabble to do that for them).
You can say that again. Most people don't seem to realise the squeeze that has occurred over the past 2 decades or so.
We won't need bullet trains, though. 120km/h trains are more than enough (combined with high-speed broadband, so people can telecommute to business meetings). Sure, maybe 4 hours on a train doesn't quite compare to 2 hours on a plane (plus 2-hour check-in, plus 40 minutes disembarkation and baggage claim. Hmmm.), but it's in the ballpark. And you can increase rail capacity a lot easier than air capacity (add another carriage). Helluva lot cheaper than expanding an airport too.
Out in the sticks, it's a different story, but people are used to long delays, waiting around, and long transit times out there anyway.
Also, the link to the NAP Submissions in the Keypost is semi-broken. Needs reformatting.
Time is money, and in a post-peak world time will be less money. The high speed mobility afforded by cars at a local level and air travel at a global level lets us get more work done and make the most of our limited free time (Americans even more so since we don't get a month of vacation like the Europeans). Will we ever go back to ocean liners and 120 km/h trains for long distance travel? I don't know. It will still be a tradeoff between time and cost.
Do we actually get more done, though, or does the improved mobility simply mean we have longer commutes, and cheap airfares to Fiji?
Bellistner, I am currently reading Tainters book 'The Collapse of complex societies.' Although not finished yet I believe his thesis is that some societies reach a point of complexity which cannot be sustained due to the law of diminishing returns and the society reverts or collapses to a simpler form. I think that this can be related directly to what is happening in the world today. Our current world has got too complex, requires too many resources of all sorts for little or no gain and as a result is starting to collapse back to a simpler form. Relating that to this post, I think most peoples worlds are going to become much smaller and as a result there won't be the need for longer commutes, international travel etc. And of course this means that the demand for aviation will fall.
Think of it like a treadmill. You have to keep running faster just to stay in the same place. If you look at just employment, mobility certainly gives you a competitive edge over other applicants. It gives you a choice of workplaces over a wider area than an applicant limited by mass transit. However, it's only an advantage until everyone gets a car and then it becomes the minimum ante to get in the game. The only counteracting force is the expense of fuel and parking, but outside of crowded downtowns, most businesses treat free parking as a price of doing business.
I am agreed with that, expense, and specific energy consumption rapidly rise with speed. I was hoping the speed cutoff could be set in the 150-180kph range however.
To understand what a lower oil-consumption future might look like, we can look at a lower-consumption past.
In the 1930s, an average wage for a skilled labourer was around US$40 a week. A third-class trip on a ship was $200 return, second-class $400 and first-class $1,000. The first cross-Atlantic flights in a rather cramped aircraft were $750.
A barrel of oil was a dollar. Demand was relatively low...
Translating that to modern prices, we get something like,
- weekly wage for a skilled labourer, $400
- cross-ocean return trip on a ship, $2,000 third class
- cross-ocean return trip on a plane, $7,500 economy class, ie about four month's wages
Could an airline industry sustain itself at such prices? I think so, yes - but by the same token, we'd see a revival of passenger shipping (as opposed to "cruises"). And the airline industry would be much smaller. Cross-ocean or cross-continental trips would be for the rich, for higher-ups in corporations, and for once-in-a-lifetime trips for regular people.
And therefore, the return of the Zeppelin.
Now, there's a wonder I hadn't thought might come back.
I agree that some aviation services may be better provided by airships. On a ton/mile basis they are way ahead of airplanes on an energy efficiency basis. The Graf Zeppelin proved that the use of hydrogen as a lifting gas can be done safely if safe practices are strictly followed. Newer materials could allow the use of higher pressure lifting cells that could use some of the hydrogen as fuel. The Graf used a mixture of flammable gases with a density close to air as fuel for its spark ignited engines.
I don't know why the myth of the energy-efficient airship persists. Well-designed (streamlined, with long wings) fixed-wing aircraft are more efficient than bulky (high-drag) airships if compared at the same speed. Jetliners fly around 600 MPH (although at high altitudes where the air is thinner, so it is effectively more like 300 MPH drag-wise). An airship at perhaps 100 MPH, or even less. An airship at 50 MPH may be an efficient freight hauler (relative to airplanes, not ship!) but would you want to ride it across an ocean (several noisy days and nights)? A better choice may be an airplane that is slower than the current jetliners. Other things being equal, the drag (and thus the energy used per mile) is proportional to the speed squared.
I was trying to find a handy inflation calculator for Australia but the switch to decimal happening only in 1966 made old numbers meaningless to a $ guy like me.
In the U.S. $40 in 1932 translates in $615 today, a little closer to skilled (definition probably varies) labor wages than $400 your calculations came up with
The Consumers Price Index calculator is handy
http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl
and the numbers its gives me jell well with what I have historically paid for things like cars and trucks back up through the 1960s. I don't have much handle on how Australia's wage/prices compared with the U.S. over that time frame, but using this calculator a $750 transatlantic airfare (zepplin?) in 1932 tranlates to about $11,600 today--a real airline industry shrinking number.
Neil, that figure is for an Airbus A380 with maximum passengers (I think that is around 800). QANTAS is only fitting there out for around 400 or so, and load factors are rarely 100%. This will be particularly so as the economic conditions worsen. So theoretically you might be right but in all practicalities I don't think that they will be able to achieve that level of economy.
Why I argue that there must be a structured downsizing is that there must be some critical mass below which airlines cease being to be viable. If the downsizing is not managed they could very well collapse mostly through a lack of foresight and planning, not because they were destined to.
Matt Mushalik has also put a submission into the Green Paper (go to the submissions link in the main post) on the impacts of peak oil on the aviation industry. I think he is even more bearish than I am.
I'd sincerely hope that you are less bearish than Matt !
I wrote a letter to Qantas they should ask the Federal Government to set aside Australian oil as feedstock for aviation fuel. We are now gobbling up our precious oil in urban areas for convenience purposes (where electric rail can do the job) while later it would be really needed for much more important things and a certain level of international flight service (not mass tourism) is necessary to keep Australia connected with the rest of the world. Think of all the scientists and engineers who will need to keep in personal contact when solving the enormous problems ahead of us.
Note that the air traffic projection for the aviation green paper was done by BITRE. They have learnt nothing since they published the WP 61
Is the World Running Out of Oil? A Review of the Debate
http://www.btre.gov.au/info.aspx?ResourceId=96&NodeId=16
in May 2005. My critique of WP 61 in August 2005 has been re-published together with my submission
http://www.infrastructure.gov.au/aviation/nap/files_green_paper/MUSHALIK...
The government is still on debating club level.
Matt,
this was a great critique. Did you get any feedback on it from BTRE? It would be very interesting to get that feedback now in the light of last years price spike and this years economic fallout.