Iaviation begins as a sport, a dandy’s hobby, and is based on the new imagination of the mastery of nature, but also on the ancient desire of man to escape his earthly condition by dreaming of being a bird. The imitation of the latter, with the gliders of Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) or the Eole of Clément Ader (1841-1925), did not give the expected result, but it prepared the big break, that of the heat engine. The sky opened up to the imagination in a harsher, more violent way, animated by the fire of the combustion engine. After the search for sensation of young men tempted by a risky adventure, it was the war of 1914-1918 which brought aviation into the real world of technology as a means of power: in 1919 the first commercial flight took place Paris- London aboard a Goliath, a converted bomber.
The end of the Second World War consecrated the transformation on a global scale of the military machine into a civilian machine. This technical object, so perilous, became in a few decades the safest means of commercial transport of all, but in return for gigantic infrastructures, material and institutional (airports, air traffic control, which controls the flying object from the ground by guiding remotely, global regulatory bodies such as the International Civil Aviation Organization in 1947), etc. Civil aeronautics has thus created the world’s first technical macrosystem.
This time is also that of the democratization of air transport (with jumbo jets like the Boeing 747, whose first flight dates back to 1969), and of a safety requirement that is no longer negotiable because it is the condition for the sky and the distance to become accessible to as many people as possible.
Escape the gravity
The journey then changes meaning. From an end in itself, it becomes a means of going as quickly and as cheaply as possible from point A to point B. The desire for freedom is thus accompanied by a trivialization which neutralizes the feeling of discovery. Fixed to his seat, the passenger watches the world as a spectator, demanding the same comfort in the air as on land. Rebound effect, the obsession with security, which concerns the danger coming from the ground, now disturbs the tranquility of travel and transforms airports, from places of escape that they were, into new spaces of confinement and control.
This brief historical reminder suggests that the issue of decarbonization is basically secondary. Commercial aviation is certainly energy-intensive (3% of global CO2 emissions2), but neither more nor less than maritime transport (between 3% and 4% today and 17% in 2050), and less than the digital industry (already 4% to 5% with consumption expected to double by here at three years).
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