Business travelers and airlines look for friendlier skies.

While the media and environmental activists have tended to focus on the auto industry over the past year, the air travel industry has been quietly evaluating ways to improve fuel efficiency and reduce emissions. Airlines can only raise ticket prices so high to compensate for rising fuel costs without losing customers, and the industry’s reputation as a climate change villain is an increasing threat to profits. Even with air travel back to pre-9/11levels, the airlines are facing several incentives to change their environmental performance or be faced again with bankruptcy. And with several airlines now testing various types and blends of biofuels, a shift in air travel could spell renewed profits for the biofuel industry as well.

Although businesses everywhere continue to pay a premium for travel in a global business world, despite advances in conferencing and networking technologies [see "Bytes not flights," April 2008], many are balking at the price, according to several recent surveys, and many corporate travel managers intend to cut the number and cost of trips in 2008. The average domestic business trip in 2008 is projected to cost 6 percent more than the average 2007 trip, according to American Express Business Travel Advisory Services (NYSE: AXP). The company predicts a 5 to 10 percent increase for international business tickets. Meetings-related travel is also growing, according to the NBTA, leading to higher overall travel costs for corporations. Despite industry predictions, there are signs that travel growth could slow without changes: Eight percent of the 215 corporate travel buyers surveyed in late 2007 by NBTA said they were beginning to curtail non-essential travel to mitigate higher costs, and 16 percent said they would cut business-class travel in 2008.

Cost pressure to reduce business travel could be good news for environmental activists who have voiced concerns about the high levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrogen oxide emissions from air travel. Planes produce 19 times the greenhouse gas emissions of trains and 190 times that of ships, and the impact of emissions released at cruising altitude is 2.7 times greater than those released at ground level, according to the nonprofit Friends of the Earth. Air travel currently accounts for about 3.5 percent of the human contribution to global warming according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but the Official Airline Guide, an air travel industry research and publishing organization, reported in March 2007 that the number of flights scheduled in October 2007 was 3 percent higher than in the same month in 2006, and was the highest October figure on record for more than five years. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), emissions from the sector could increase 60 percent by 2025, and the number of passengers traveling by air could reach the 1 billion mark by 2015.

In Europe, super-cheap intra-European flights from airlines such as easyJet and Ryanair have come under fire for contributing to a sudden spike in emissions. While easyJet has responded by launching a redesign of its jets that the company claims will improve fuel efficiency while reducing CO2 emissions by 50 percent, and offering consumers the option of purchasing carbon offsets, such voluntary offset programs could be short lived [see “Offsets take off,” SI, April 2008 ]. At the start of the year, European airlines agreed to a cap- and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions associated with intra-European flights beginning in 2011; international airlines would be expected to join in 2012. The proposal has been aggressively opposed by the U.S. government, which claims it is in violation of international aviation and trade law, and by airlines worldwide, which say the cost of joining the scheme would cripple them. The E.U. proposal was also taken up by several agencies and five U.S. states, including California, in a late December lawsuit filed against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The claimants argue the agency has a responsibility to use its power to regulate air travel emissions.

Airplane pilots (or their hi-tech counterparts) can use strategic flight patterns to reduce fuel use on the go.