2023-05-10 09:24:01
At Paris Orly, the number of flights is already limited to 250,000 per year, and a curfew is in place at night. Markus Mainka / stock.adobe.com
Demonstrations are being organized across Europe from this Tuesday to demand a limit on the number of flights at airports and impose a night curfew on them.
Should the number of flights at airports be capped? This is the request of associations fighting against pollution in the air sector, meeting this Tuesday, May 9 in front of the Ministry of Transport. The demonstrators, largely residents of airports, but also environmental activists, also want a curfew to be put in place to prevent night take-offs and landings. Several other gatherings are planned until Friday around French and European airports.
«We’re not here to ground planes“, reassures Chantal Beer-Demander, president of the French Union against aircraft nuisance (UFCNA), who simply says she wants traffic control, whose growth has resumed since the end of the health crisis. Necessary measures, according to her, to preserve the health of local residents, victims of noise and chemical pollution, and to fight against global warming. The aviation sector is responsible for 6.4% of CO emissions2 In France, according to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC). “We must reduce our emissions, recalls Chantal Beer-Demander. Should we then continue to advocate all-out growth?»
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Towards 12% fewer flights in Amsterdam
One country has already taken the plunge: the Dutch government has decided to reduce traffic at Amsterdam Schiphol, the busiest European airport, from 2023. The annual number of rotations should drop from 500,000 to 460,000 by the end of the year, then to 440,000 at the end of 2024, accompanied by a limitation of movements at night. This is the model advocated by French activists, who wish, outside the curfew, to see airports cap their number of flights at a threshold below 10% to 12% of their pre-Covid traffic.
Read alsoClimate: will we still be flying in twenty years?
Such measures already exist at Paris Orly, subject to a curfew from 11:30 p.m. to 6 a.m., and a cap of 250,000 flights per year (for 218,000 effective flights in 2019), indicates Paris Aéroports to the Figaro. «We have also made a commitment to reduce noise by six decibels during the 10 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. slot.In Paris Charles-de-Gaulle, traffic is only limited at night, to around 17,000 slots per year. During the day, however, the manager believes that “traffic is capped by a noise index […]30% lower today than 15 years ago despite the increase in trafficand below the set threshold. In 2019, 498,000 flights took off from Roissy, 3.3% more than the previous year (when traffic fell by 4.9% at Orly).
natural ceiling
With the increase in traffic and the abandonment of projects for new airports such as Notre-Dame-des-Landes, “the existing platforms will anyway find themselves naturally saturated in a few years“says Bertand Vilmer, partner at the firm Icare and specialist in the aviation sector. A limitation “artificial“, by an imposed ceiling, like that requested by the associations, would have an immediate impact for the expert: “Companies will fall back on the most profitable lines, and medium-sized towns will be less well served.And the scarcity of flight slots will lead to higher prices.
Another pitfall raised by Bertrand Vilmer, that of the European and international regulatory framework, which limits restriction initiatives. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) strongly opposed to the capping of flights at Amsterdam-Schiphol, denouncing a “hostile and job-destroying approachwhich would go against European law and international law.
Challenged in court, the decision of the Dutch government was also canceled at the beginning of April, for the first threshold which was to come into force at the end of 2023. The judge considered that European law had indeed not been respected, the companies did not not having had enough time to prepare for it. The second stage of the cap at 440,000 flights for the end of 2024 has not, however, been revoked.
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