Doubtless with some exceptions, just about everyone who traveled to Geneva in May for the annual EBACE show sincerely believes they are an environmentalist, concerned about the impact of flying and other human activities on our shared planet and committed to doing something about it.

That would include the lively and diverse group of protestors who joined the officially-sanctioned demonstration outside Palexpo on the evening of the show’s opening day, and also all the industry executives who participated in multiple EBACE meetings focused on sustainability and reducing aviation's carbon footprint.

It would also include the estimated 100 or so overtly hostile protestors who earlier the same day forced their way onto the EBACE static display of aircraft, breaching security at Geneva Airport and disrupting operations for an hour or more. Dozens of aircraft were diverted or flew in holding patterns, burning far too much fossil fuel needlessly.

For the companies who made major investments of time and money to come to EBACE, it is easy to feel indignant about the unprecedented protests targeting business and private aviation. And especially so for companies whose aircraft were damaged when protestors swarmed onto the static display with handcuffs intent on circling the jets, and also for showgoers who choked on the pepper spray dispensed by police in a bid to restore order.

Seven protestors handcuffed themselves to a Gulfstream on static display, with three attached to the nose gear and four on the jet’s cabin entry door handrails, while more secured themselves to other aircraft.

But this isn’t a moment for the industry to wallow in self-pity. This isn’t the first time the industry has come under fire, and it won’t be the last. Perception is reality and an increasingly widely-held perception is that business aviation is the poster child for wreckless damage to the environment.

What’s new, and troubling, is that air shows and conventions now seem to be on the front line. In February, protestors disrupted EBAA’s Air Ops conference in Brussels after reportedly managing to register for the event based on a bogus connection with an industry executive.

On June 7, the private aviation sector suffered one of its most egregious acts so far when protestors broke onto the ramp at Sylt Airport in northern Germany and covered a Cessna Citation CJ1+ almost entirely with orange paint before gluing themselves to the business jet and the tarmac. Local police confirmed that five people aged between 21 and 60 were arrested and that a criminal investigation is underway.

In its lengthy public statement, the group called Letze Generation (Last Generation) admitted that it used bolt cutters to break through the airport fence in two places before running toward a group of business jets parked on the apron. The protesters appear to have selected the Citation somewhat randomly for their protest. They unfurled banners on the wing with German slogans that translate to “your luxury = our drought” and “your luxury = crop failures.” 

Three months earlier, in November 2022, groups including Extinction Rebellion and Scientist Rebellion, who were also present at EBACE, tried to disrupt operations at business aviation facilities in the UK, Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands. These protests included blockades in the London area at the entrances of Farnborough Airport and the Harrods Aviation FBO at Luton Airport.

Similar protests were also staged in the same week at Milan Linate Airport when around 500 members of Greenpeace rode bicycles into the business aviation enclave at Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and blocked aircraft from being moved. In September 2022, protestors sprayed graffiti on the Signature Flight Support FBO at Paris Le Bourget Airport.

Could Protests Discourage Air Show Participation?

Several executives with U.S. business aviation companies speaking to AIN off the record indicated that they fully expect the protests to eventually reach North America. Regulars on the air show circuit might well shudder to think how that might play out in some U.S. cities where police responses to public protests are, how shall I put it, somewhat more robust than they are in Europe.

The atmosphere during the protest on the static display in Geneva was scary, begging the question as to whether some companies might take the view that participation just isn’t worth the risk to their people and valuable assets.

But let’s circle back to the evening of May 23 and the "official" protest outside EBACE that show organizers, EBAA and NBAA, had actually facilitated (as they were required to do under local Swiss law) to the extent that they actually paid for access to the site on which it was held.

This AIN reporter was present and it has to be said the protest was peaceful without overt hostility to any of the showgoers. It included singing and a comedy routine performed in French and English depicting aircraft cabin crew making announcements about the imminent destruction of the planet. I was able to mingle with protestors, some of whom seemed intrigued that, as a journalist supposedly aligned with their enemy, I would want to hear their side of the story.

Six or more speakers made it clear the fundamental demand was that business and private aviation must be completely and indefinitely grounded, as a first step to suspending or severely curtailing pretty much every form of air transport. What struck me, though, was that the underlying cause of resentment goes beyond carbon and climate change.

What's the Beef? Saving the Planet or Railing Against Inequality?

During the early 1980s as a student reporter, I covered the bitter coal industry strike in 1980s Britain, and I have to say that the current wave of anti-aviation protests has the look and feel of the class war I witnessed back then. To paraphrase the messaging of groups like Extinction Rebellion: it’s not just that private jet flights have a disproportionate impact on the environment in terms of carbon footprint per passenger, but that some, if not many of these passengers, are viewed as bad people: overly entitled billionaires exploiting the poor, tax evaders, mobsters, and worse.

One of the speakers argued that private aviation is for the 0.01 percent, a population group that she deemed even more despicable than the much-maligned One Percent. She didn’t want to hear my suggestion that most of the people in Palexpo were there paying their mortgages and putting kids through school, aspiring to little more than being in the top ten percent wealth group at best. I didn’t get the chance to deliver a homily on the number of jobs companies and individuals using private aviation are responsible for generating.

It's hard to know how to counter this narrative. But during a fascinating EBACE panel session on the “Future of Business Aviation” in which I participated, my fellow panelist Ian Petts, head of yachting and aviation services at Equiom Monaco, urged the industry to redouble their efforts to talk up business aviation’s contributions to the economy.

At the same time, he added that companies must urgently recruit a more diverse workforce in a way that could break through stereotypes about its profile. That’s partly a response to the serious skills shortage faced by the industry, but also with a view to changing the optics around a perceived country-club culture in which industry leaders can be all too readily caricatured as too male, stale, and pale. I ticked all the boxes for this profile, and I was all too well aware of the assumptions being made by the protestors when I engaged with them in Geneva.

But the fact is business aviation isn’t going anywhere and many of the people it serves aren’t going back to the airlines, or even to the trains. That doesn’t mean they are oblivious to their environmental responsibilities. The trouble is, the environmentalists outside the doors of EBACE simply don’t believe the environmentalists inside the doors are sincere, branding their efforts to cut carbon as ‘green-washing’ propaganda.

The drive to make sustainable aviation fuel more available and widely used is viewed by these activists as entirely bogus. In their view, tools such as book-and-claim and carbon offsetting are no more than spreadsheet ploys and disreputable accounting intended to dupe the gullible into believing that real change is coming.

After being on the front lines at EBACE, one change in the narrative I’m now convinced must happen is for industry advocates to stop parroting the line that business aviation’s global carbon dioxide emissions account for around 2 percent of all aviation emissions and around 0.04 of all global man-made emissions.

Even if this is true, it is only true in the here and now and is a hollow response to the inevitable rise in these proportions as other industries cut the carbon output. It does little to address the unavoidable challenge of meeting the ICAO-endorsed commitment to achieve net zero carbon by 2050.

Action to Cut Carbon Is A Legal Requirement, Not a Nice to Do

Too many people in the industry still seem to view carbon reduction as a nice-to-do aspiration or a suggestion. It’s not; it’s the law—international law.

Under the terms of The Paris Agreement adopted by 196 signatories at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 25) held in Paris in December 2015 at Le Bourget Airport (of all places), states committed to a goal of restricting “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 Celsius above pre-industrial levels” and to pursue efforts, “to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

Subsequent UN COP conferences have refined these objectives and backed them up with more specific calls to action. These legally binding commitments have since been enshrined in specific commitments made by just about every industry on the face of the earth. At the start of June, the World Meteorological Organization issued new data predicting that the world is on pace to see at least one year in the future in which the global average surface temperature tops 1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels. If that trend continues, it could blow a hole in the COP 25 Paris objectives and increase pressure for tougher action on climate change. On November 30, the COP 28 conference will convene in Dubai and will be chaired by Sultan Al Jaber whose day job is being the CEO of the UAE's state oil and gas producer Adnoc—an appointment that has triggered extreme cynicism among environmental groups.

The bottom line, though, is that if aviation doesn’t do its share of the heavy lifting, then governments will likely have to resort to more sticks and fewer carrots to shift the dial. That, and/or other industries will have to do more, and that’s hardly going to improve the standing of aviation in the court of public opinion.

On the very day of the protests at EBACE, France’s transport minister Clément Beaune confirmed the introduction of his long-threatened ban on domestic airline flights between the cities of Nantes, Bordeaux, Lyon, and Paris Orly Airport, on the basis that train services are available for these routes with a travel time of less than two hours and 30 minutes. The directive, which Beaune said has been cleared by the European Commission, is the first such ban in the world.

The question is whether these measures, which are widely considered to be political gestures, will be the last and whether measures like this could be extended to private aviation. Let me help you with that: no and yes, although it’s hard to be sure how this might play out.

At a meeting of European Union transport ministers on June 1, the Belgian and Irish governments indicated they will join efforts by France and the Netherlands to target emissions from business aviation. However, EU transport commissioner Adina Vālean insisted that she has no intention of proposing any such measures before the end of the European Commission’s current mandate, which ends on June 30, 2023. The rotating presidency of the European Commission will next be held by Spain, followed by Belgium, before transitioning to Hungary in the second half of 2024. Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban has described the EU's policy to deal with climate change as "a utopian fantasy"—a position that might at least make private aviation seem progressive by comparison in the eyes of its opponents.