Originally Posted by
Gove N.T.
Check out the days of Trident, 727, 707 etc and see the exhaust and then compare with the 380, 787, 350 of today and tell me that the industry has its head in the sand, hasn't progressed.
To be fair, I don't think the industry is smugly patting itself on the back for being able to build aircraft that are quieter and cleaner than those of 50 years ago - that's hardly an ambitious target.
Anyway that's only half of the issue - as alluded to by previous posters, it's also a question of volume. Certainly noise and emissions
per flight have reduced significantly over the years, but that's been offset by a roughly 30x increase in global RPKs over the same period.
Clearly, if aviation's net contribution (in absolute terms) to global emissons is not to increase, then either continuing improvements in technology have to at least keep pace with traffic growth and/or the latter has to be subject to constraints. It's not rocket science.