Sustainability is a Team Effort, Leaders Emphasize to Media Breakfast Attendees

Oct. 22, 2024

Held immediately prior to the opening of the 2024 NBAA Business Aviation Convention & Exhibition (NBAA-BACE), the NBAA-GAMA CLIMBING. FAST. Media Breakfast highlighted collaborative efforts between business aircraft manufacturers, industry leaders and government officials toward the goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Central to the event was a panel discussion hosted by NBAA President and CEO Ed Bolen and Pete Bunce, president and CEO of the General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA).

“It was a year ago today that we launched CLIMBING. FAST,” Bolen said, “to tell the world the societal benefits of business aviation, and to underscore not just our commitment to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, but to outline a pathway on how we have been making progress and how we’re moving forward with a sense of urgency.”

“We’ve grown in a collective cause,” agreed Michael Amalfitano, president and CEO of Embraer Executive Jets. “The pathway to getting to net zero is through innovation and advancing sustainable technology,” including greater adoption of sustainable aviation fuel, or SAF.

“And we have to get there fast,” he added. “And we have to do it safely. We have to do it accessibly; we have to do it responsibly and we have to do it with the interest of all the stakeholders in the industry.”

Bunce added, “Our board of directors devoted considerable resources and said, ‘What can we do across [Europe and the U.S.] to show what our industry brings to society? We’re putting this all together and feeding it into CLIMBING. FAST. so that we have this toolkit for grasstops and the general public about what our industry does for this planet.”

The need for greater sustainability in business aviation was first recognized in 2009, as industry leaders joined the Business Aviation Commitment on Climate Change. That initial pledge, which called for halving industry CO2 emissions by 2050, has since evolved to a commitment to net-zero carbon emissions within the next 25 years.

“That was one of the best examples of collaboration between all the stakeholders coming together for a common goal,” said J.C. Gallagher, executive vice president for aircraft sales and defense at Bombardier. “And then we came together again in 2021 to ask, ‘How are we doing?’ We’re doing better than we thought, so let’s push the target even further.”

JoeBen Bevirt, founder and CEO of Joby Aviation, pointed to the critical role of innovations including advanced air mobility and electric and hydrogen propulsion on that path.

“This is a wildly exciting new age for business aviation,” he said. “Hydrogen has three times the specific energy of jet fuel, and we can convert it into propulsion twice as efficiently [with electric motors] as a small turbine can convert jet fuel into propulsion. So, you take a three-times gain and a two-times gain, you multiply them together, and you’ve got a 6x gain.”

These efforts are also recognized at the federal level, said Jeff Marootian, principal deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“We have been working aggressively, using all of the available tools that we have to enable the private sector to lead [in sustainability],” he said. “We know this is an effort that requires that level of collaboration.

“The Inflation Reduction Act accelerated our ability to make strategic investments in everything from SAF to hydrogen to electrification [and] enabling solar and wind and geothermal power that help ensure we’re able to produce these things renewably as well,” Marootian added.