IATA’s Willie Walsh: some APAC airlines financially “precarious”

Talking at the CAPA Live on 10-Nov-2021, IATA Director General spoke with CAPA’s chairman emeritus Peter Harbison. Some of the key highlights can be found below.

What we need to see is fuel companies providing SAF at scale. And once they start providing it at scale, then it’ll deal with the other critical issue, which is price.
We need fuel companies mandated to produce the product. And once we get governments aligned on this issue, then we get a policy framework that works on a global basis to incentivise the production.
Even if you try and suppress the growth of aviation, that’s not going to improve the environmental performance. What we’ve got to do is reduce the amount of additional CO2 that we’re putting in the atmosphere and that’s where sustainable fuels come into play.
By 2030, we’re going to have a greater visibility around the potential for what would be a step change in technology such as hydrogen.
There are a lot of these CO2 calculators out there which will calculate for you the CO2 on your specific flight. They’re all wrong. It is an area we’ve got to get better.
You’ve got to give credit to the industry the way they were able to sort of pivot their traditional passenger business to capture the opportunity that existed through cargo traffic, which produced at least some cash flow for the industry there.