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By Brady Jones
Medill Reports

Carbon emissions from European air travel could increase by at least 21 percent by 2040, according to a newly released study.

The 2019 European Aviation Environmental Report highlights the growth trend in the aviation sector throughout the continent. The number of kilometers flown in Europe has increased by 20 percent since 2014 and 60 percent since 2005.

This gain in travel, however, contributed an estimated 163 million metric tons of full-flight carbon dioxide emissions in 2017—an increase of 10 percent since 2014 and 16 percent since 2005. This is the equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions of more than 34 million cars, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emissions calculator.

The report, published by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), examines this growth by the aviation industry in the context of the European Union’s stated goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. In 2016, the aviation industry was responsible for 3.6 percent of greenhouse gas emissions for the EU and 13.4 percent of its overall transportation emissions. This represents the second highest release of transportation emissions after road traffic.

Violeta Bulc, European Union commissioner for transport, acknowledges in the report that although this growth in air travel means increased revenue and jobs for Europeans, it comes at a significant cost to the environment.

“Aviation has externalities that can’t be overlooked,” she says in the report. “Indeed, as air traffic increases year on year, the same holds true for environmental and health impacts.”

While declining to comment directly on what role the European Union should play in reducing aviation emissions, European Commission spokesperson Stephan Meder pointed to specific ongoing programs supported by the Commission that aim to curb carbon emissions. These include the International Civil Aviation Organization—a specialized United Nations agency—and a program it has implemented called the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation. According to Meder, it is the first ever global program to address carbon dioxide emissions in a specific sector of the economy. Meder declined to comment on whether the Commission supports Europeans reducing their amount of air travel.

The aviation report notes the potential for alternative sustainable aviation fuel sources to help reduce carbon emissions, but it also acknowledges that the impact will likely be minimal for the foreseeable future. Bio-based aviation fuels could be produced from sources such as woody biomass, hydrogenated fats and oils, recycled waste or other renewable sources, says the report, but they are largely used in a minimal role in blended fuel in order to comply with aviation fuel combustion standards. As such, much of the carbon reduction for current aviation biofuels takes place in the fuel production process rather than during flight. Currently, there is not an agreed upon definition of sustainable aviation fuel that is accepted at the international level.

Despite the heightened focus on reducing emissions—the average fuel burn per individual air traveler has actually decreased by 2.4 percent per year from 2014 to 2017—the overall carbon emissions in Europe have increased as a result of an added number of flights, larger size of aircraft and longer distances flown. Any technological advances that will reduce emissions are overcome, however, because more people are flying.

There is a growing recognition of this problem, and for some the answer is simple: stop flying so much. In Europe, the vast train network provides a low-carbon alternative, yet train travel hasn’t stopped the increase in air travel. In the United States, a comparable, carbon-free transportation network does not yet exist.

Parke Wilde, professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Massachusetts, manages a website and Twitter account called Flying Less. He is adamant that universities and professional organizations around the world must lead the way by setting and monitoring goals to reduce the overall number of flights.

“In the U.S. our initiative envisions university communities as leaders and catalysts, showing the way forward for bigger economic sectors,” said Wilde via email. “A key lesson is that we have to act collectively.”

Wilde acknowledges that currently there are limited carbon-free alternatives to air travel available to many Americans, but academics and professionals should still try to set the standard. EASA acknowledges the need to balance aviation industry growth with carbon reductions. In an emailed statement, Jagello Fayl, EASA spokesperson, described several methods for accomplishing this.

“EASA is supporting the implementation of a ‘basket of measures’, in cooperation with international partners, to mitigate aviation’s contribution to climate change,” he said. “These are summarised in the EAER 2019 (European Aviation Environmental Report) and include advanced fuel-efficient technology and design, optimised operational procedures, air traffic management, sustainable aviation fuels and market-based measures.”

Hans Bruyninckx, executive director of the European Economic Area, echoed that personal-responsibility sentiment in the report.

“Europe must lead the way towards a more sustainable aviation sector at home and abroad,” he says. “Strong policies and robust implementation can mitigate future impacts of a growing sector as well as foster innovation and the fundamental shift needed in consumer behavior.”

All quotes delayed a minimum of 15 minutes. See here for a complete list of exchanges and delays.

© 2019 Reuters. All Rights Reserved.

Most travelers know that causing unruly behavior on a flight can lead to dire consequences, but many may not realize that you can also get in big trouble for not setting foot on a flight at all. While missing a leg of a flight might sometimes be unavoidable due to changes in travel plans, savvy travelers have been purposely missing the second leg of their flights for years to save hundreds of dollars on fares. Recently, Lufthansa Airlines even sued a passenger €2,112 ($2,374) for this practice, which is known as “hidden-city ticketing.” (A Berlin court dismissed the suit, but the carrier plans to appeal, according to CNN.)

But are the fares legal, and is it worth checking them out? Here’s what you need to know.

What is hidden-city ticketing?

The “hidden cities” in this context are all of the places that become much cheaper to fly to when you’re supposed to only be there for a few hours on a layover instead of a final destination. To be clear, we’re not talking about mystical destinations such as Colombia’s Lost City (although you should still definitely go there) but places such as Detroit or Houston that become much cheaper to fly to when they’re the appetizer instead of the main meal of your three-course flying experience. That’s because airline pricing depends on a lot of factors besides just the cost of fuel—competition on the route, the popularity of business travel, and other factors play a role.

As a hypothetical example, let’s say we’re flying from Boston to Oklahoma City and looking for flights. If you scour the main search engine websites such as Kayak or Google Flights, you’ll see many connecting flights to Oklahoma City with stops in other places such as Philadelphia or Chicago. However, the goal in hidden-city ticketing would be to find a journey where Oklahoma City is the layover on a flight to a final destination you don’t plan to visit. In the end, that could look like buying a flight between Boston to Los Angeles and getting off the plane with no intentions of setting foot on the West Coast.

So, how does one reveal these so-called hidden cities? The website Skiplagged pioneered this practice and is still up and running, even after United Airlines and Orbitz sued the company’s founder Aktarer Zaman in 2014 (Orbitz settled and the remaining case was eventually dropped because the judge said that court didn’t have jurisdiction, CNN reported). Today, Skipplagged has a “few million” active users per month that scour the website for flights or hotel deals, says Skiplagged’s Head of Design and Experience Philippe Ramet. These could be for hidden-city tickets that make up “a bit more than 20 percent” of flights on the website, or for the more “regular” flights that go from point A to B per usual.

While it’s true that you can save a lot of money using hidden-city tickets, we suggest looking at other options first due to issues that could arise at the airport and after the trip.

Is it legal?

Hidden-city ticketing tends to go against airlines’ rules, but actually getting sued for the practice is unlikely for those not doing it often. Lufthansa says “legal disputes in this context are very rare,” in part because recalculating the fare the passenger would have owed must follow certain laws.

Skiplagged says on its website that these hidden-city flights are “perfectly legal.” It looks like this is now the case for those traveling on Iberia due to a recent Spanish court decision. But regardless of the possible legal interpretations of hidden-city ticketing around the globe, there are still consequences and considerations that could affect your trip and relationship with airlines.

What are some possible trip complications?

One of the biggest reasons why it might be a good idea to look elsewhere for travel deals is that traveling on hidden-city tickets requires you to remember a lot of little rules.

For starters, flying on a hidden-city itinerary requires being extra careful about your baggage. Skiplagged tells customers not to check bags, but notes that even carry-ons could pose an issue if there’s not enough space on the aircraft. While some airlines can gate-check bags, others might check it to the final destination if there’s not enough room.

Another downside of traveling with hidden-city tickets is the risk of weather-related or logistical issues throwing a wrench in your plans. For example, you could be on a flight between New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport and Los Angeles with a stop in Chicago, but the airline would prioritize getting you to Los Angeles before putting you on another itinerary that happens to stop in Chicago. Offering to go to Chicago anyway through another itinerary could raise suspicion that you are purposely intending to get around that carrier’s fare rules.

“Hidden-city is a risky move to make; it is not without some potential risks to the traveler,” says Henry Harteveldt, travel industry analyst and president of San Francisco-based Atmosphere Research Group. He notes that if the itinerary changes, “the airline has every right to rebook you on one of those different flights.”

Airlines could cancel the rest of your flight if you don’t show up for one of the legs, so hidden-city ticketing is also unreliable for round-trip fares. There may even be an added cost in some cases.

“If a customer does not show up for his outbound flight, the return flight is still available to him as originally booked,” a Lufthansa spokeswoman told Condé Nast Traveler when asked if passengers get any warning before the airline takes action against hidden-city ticketing. “However, Lufthansa will then recalculate the ticket price which corresponds to the actual travel route (e.g. one-way fare).” Anyone who foresees missing a leg of a flight should notify the carrier immediately, she said.

And these are just the issues in transit. There are also some bigger consequences you will have to think about if you plan to use hidden-city ticketing.

What are some of the bigger consequences?

There’s a good chance you might not run into any of the above-mentioned problems, but you’ll also have to be aware of the potential, bigger consequences of using hidden-city ticketing.

A passenger that skips a leg of a flight for any reason once probably won’t get in trouble, but if the pattern persists there could be issues. Skiplagged warns customers on its website not to “overuse” these itineraries: “Do not fly hidden-city on the same route with the same airline dozens of times within a short time frame,” it states.

But how much is too much? Harteveldt warns that airlines now have better technology to catch those abusing the practice, and that flying hidden-city flights even once a year for several years might be enough to draw a carrier’s attention. He notes that eventual consequences could include sternly-worded letters asking for payment (like the one an elite reader of The Points Guy reportedly received), lawsuits, a forfeiture of frequent-flier miles, or even getting banned from an airline.

“Don’t say it can’t happen to you, because it could, and it doesn’t matter what route, what cabin class of service, what your frequent-flier status is or anything else,” Harteveldt says. “If you are serially abusing hidden-city fares, the airlines will at some point catch you—and they will take action.”

Where can I find my airline’s rules?

Whether using hidden-city flights or not, passengers do enter into an agreement with airlines about how their tickets can be used. These are outlined in a document known as the “contract of carriage” or “conditions of carriage,” and can usually be found on the airline’s website.

Chances are you’ll be going against an airline’s rules if you buy a ticket with the intent of missing a flight. American Airlines’ conditions of carriage, for example, note that “reservations made to exploit or circumvent fare and ticket rules are strictly prohibited.” It cites hidden-city fares as an example, along with some other activities including buying a ticket just to use the lounge or booking a ticket for someone without their permission. American says if you are exploiting the airline, it could “charge you for what the ticket would have cost if you hadn’t booked it fraudulently,” cancel the rest of the itinerary, or even refuse that person the right to fly.

How else can I save money on tickets, legally?

Airline pricing isn’t straightforward, but knowing some tricks of the trade can help you find airfare deals without setting yourself up for the pitfalls of hidden-city ticketing. For example, routes with a lot of competition and low-cost carriers can lead to better deals, Harteveldt says.

Using a price tracker such as those available on Kayak, flexing your loyalty accounts or checking out one of the many e-mail lists for deals are all good options (Condé Nast Traveler has compiled several tips here). So, regardless of whether you’ll get caught, we suggest searching for other alternatives and paying a little more for some peace of mind.

CLOSE

A Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed in Ethiopia killing everyone on board. The crash of the Ethiopian Airlines plane marks the second deadliest accident involving a Boeing 737 in the past five months. So is there a problem with this particular model?
USA TODAY

Last October, a Boeing 737 Max 8, operated by a low-cost Indonesian airline called Lion Air, crashed  after takeoff from Jakarta, killing everyone on board. Then, on Sunday, an Ethiopian Airlines 737 Max crashed near Addis Ababa, under eerily similar circumstances, killing 157 people from more than 30 countries.

The million dollar question is whether these accidents are linked, and whether Boeing’s 737 Max, the newest and most sophisticated variant of its venerable 737 line, harbors a deadly defect.

Reports of the Lion Air crash point to a flaw in something called MCAS, which stands for Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, an automatic system designed to keep the plane’s nose from pitching upward at too steep of an angle. The problem occurs when faulty data sense an impending aerodynamic stall when there isn’t one, triggering the plane’s stabilizer trim — stabilizers are the wing-like horizontal surfaces beneath the tail — to force the nose down.

Read more commentary:

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Essentially, evidence suggests that the Lion Air pilots lost control of their ability to maintain level flight and failed to recognize what was happening in time to disconnect the errant system.  

Did the same thing happen in Ethiopia? 

Grounding their Boeing 737 Max fleets

At this point it’s impossible to know, but certainly things are pointing in that direction, and a growing number of countries are worried enough to have ordered the grounding of their carriers’ 737 Max fleets. If the investigators do determine a link, there’s quite a bit at stake — for the plane’s manufacturer, for the world’s airlines and for the traveling public. Boeing will need to implement a fix, be it a hardware solution, a software solution or both, in a process that is likely to take weeks or longer.

In the meantime, is the Max safe to fly? The short answer is yes. Why the Ethiopian pilots didn’t simply override the errant MCAS, if in fact that’s what they were dealing with, isn’t understood. Perhaps, like the Lion Air crew before them, they were simply overwhelmed by a cascade of warnings, faulty messages and unstable aircraft movements.

But disconnecting the system is, or should be, pretty straightforward, and passengers can take some comfort in knowing that Max pilots everywhere, together with the various airline training departments, are acutely aware of the issue and how to deal with it.   

The outright grounding of an aircraft model is unusual but not unprecedented. New jets are sometimes beset by technical issues in their early days of service. Normally these problems are minor, if expensive, nuisances (engine problems plagued the first 747s, for example). But there have been catastrophic instances too.

Despite headlines, air travel is remarkably safe

We remember the Comet, the world’s first commercial jet, and the stress-crack disasters that led to its grounding and redesign. The McDonnell Douglas DC-10 was plagued by troubles from the start, including a poorly designed cargo door that  killed 346 people in the horrific Turkish Airlines crash in 1974. Five years later, all DC-10s in the United States were grounded by the Federal Aviation Administration after the crash of American Airlines Flight 191 killed 271 people at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport — to this day, the deadliest crash ever on U.S. soil, excluding the 9/11 attacks. More recently, the 787’s debut was marred by a series of battery fires.

For the airline passenger, these can seem like scary times. Air crashes, perhaps more than any other type of catastrophe, have a way of haunting the public’s consciousness, particularly when the causes are mysterious. 

My best advice, maybe, is to take a step back and look at this through a wider lens. The fact is, Lion Air and Ethiopian notwithstanding, air travel has never been safer. Out of 35 million commercial global flights in 2017, only two ended in accidents resulting in deaths of passengers.

Since the Lion Air incident, two fatal crashes in five months is tragic, but in decades past it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen or more air disasters worldwide in a given year. Nowadays, two or more is downright unusual.

In the United States, there hasn’t been a large-scale disaster involving a mainline carrier in a decade — an absolutely astonishing statistic. There are far more planes, carrying far more passengers, than ever before, yet the accident rate is a fraction of what it once was. Despite the recent headlines and until we know more information, then, airline passengers should fly easy.

Patrick Smith is an airline pilot and the host of www.askthepilot.com. His book, “Cockpit Confidential,” is a New York Times bestseller. Follow him on Twitter @askthepilot.