The president of Airbus, Alberto Gutiérrez, has described on Monday the main bets of the European aircraft manufacturer during his speech at the breakfasts of the Nueva Económica Forum held this Monday in Madrid.
In the long term, the European aviation giant has focused its efforts on the development of the hydrogen airplane, but as Guitérrez acknowledged, "it is still very early because we do not know how to produce hydrogen on a massive scale, or compress it to safely reduce its volume." that requires an airplane”, has recognized Gutiérrez for whom the hydrogen airplane will not be a reality, at least until 2035.
But that distant objective does not imply that the aviation sector should cut its activity to reduce emissions. "The future is not about traveling less, but about traveling in a more sustainable way", he assured after explaining that 78% of world tourism uses planes to travel and that this type of travel will increase with the entry into the market of a huge middle class from countries like India. "Of the 1.3 million inhabitants, some 700,000 can already be considered the middle class with the capacity to spend on leisure and the trend is the same in other Asian countries," said the manager.
To face this increase in demand and make it compatible with the decarbonisation objectives that Brussels has set for the aeronautical sector, Airbus's great bet is on the most efficient aircraft and the SAF (English acronym that responds to Sustinible Aviation Fuel), a fuel from waste that can already work on existing aircraft and that reduces emissions from all current models.
The change of fleet to replace more polluting models with more sustainable ones goes through objectives such as that 50% will be replacements before 2030. The star model to advance in sustainable aviation is the Neo, with 25% fewer emissions and which already represent a quarter of the total fleet.
In any case, Alberto Gutiérrez wanted to reduce the pressure on the sector in terms of pollution. "Currently, commercial aviation is responsible for 2% of global emissions, this is a percentage six times lower than that of the road," he assured. That without, without failing to assume that with these figures Airbus, as the producer of 50% of the world's planes, is responsible for 1% of the emissions.
In the short term, the great challenge for the company is to face the bottlenecks in the supply chain. “If before a normal delivery was made in 8 months, now we are receiving it in 20 months. So you have to work well in advance.
The situation is better than last year, but there are signs of weakness until 2025", he assured.
