Addressing the Linkage from Air Transport Development to General Sustainability Goals

Within the last decades the air transport sector grew considerably with all its positive as well as negative effects on the three pillars of sustainability: economy, environment and social issues. Consequently, the striving for economic growth and welfare which is driven by aviation has to find balance against the public interest in an efficient, safe and affordable air transport system by minimising the environmental impacts at the same time. Addressing this problem, the claim of this paper is to present a consistent scientific approach that is the foundation to (1) describe developments in air transport with regard to its economic, environmental and social impacts in a structural way, (2) monitor changes over time and (3) assess the overall development in the air transport system in the context of general sustainability. Based on this research framework the outcome of this paper is first to introduce a harmonised system of indicators that is capable of showing general trends in air transport in linkage to the three dimensions of sustainability on a macroscopic level. In a second step, this indicator system will be extended to conduct an analysis of long-term trends over 20 years to identify system-immanent trends and interdependencies between the selected indicators. In a last step, the analysed air transport development will then be compared with general sustainability goals from the field of politics and the aviation industry in order to assess the observed trends. Conclusions for the improvement of the performance of air transport in regard to sustainability will be drawn from this work.