The UK private jet market has seen explosive post-pandemic growth, such that one in ten flights departing UK airports are now on private jets. A recent report by the organisation Possible, where I work, shows there were 90,256 private jet departures in the UK in 2022 – a shocking testament to the government’s failure to rein in the industry’s climate impacts.
If you are someone with enough capital to fly a private jet, you might not be thinking of the cost to the planet – but you should be, given the need to cut emissions in order to meet our 2050 climate targets.
Private jet flights produce 20 to 30 times the emissions of an ordinary flight per passenger and are a luxury very few people can afford. Yet the impact of these carbon-intensive short-haul flights seem to go over most people’s heads. That may be because private jet companies like to tout their environmentally-friendly initiatives to combat those emissions and do their part for the climate emergency.
