The national secretary of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts is in favor of a ban on these private flights, as are the ecologist deputies who failed to have them banned in the National Assembly.
Green MPs want to ban private jets. This is what they proposed Thursday, April 6 to the National Assembly, even if their bill brought within the framework of their day reserved for the Palais Bourbon could not be voted for lack of time. The government, opposed to a ban, will propose a “ecocontribution revised upwards” in 2024 for private commercial aviation, Transport Minister Clément Beaune announced on Thursday.
In the meantime, according to Marine Tondelier, the national secretary of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, these jets are more and more numerous. She even put forward a precise figure, on franceinfo: “In 2022, the use of private jets increased by 64%.”
570,000 private flights in Europe
This is the figure put forward by the NGO Greenpeace, which has identified all private flights that took off and landed in a European country over the period 2020 to 2022, and indeed there is a jump of 64%. If we speak in absolute value, we have gone in Europe from 350,000 private flights in 2021 to just over 570,000 last year.
France is one of the countries where there are the most private flights since we are the 2nd country in Europe where there have been the most private flights, just behind the United Kingdom. Greenpeace lists just over 85,000 jets that took off or landed at a French airport last year. Moreover, two French cities stand out clearly and are part of the ten most popular European private flight routes last year. These are Paris and Nice, which serve London and Geneva in particular.
Often short journeys
Another particularity of these private flights: most of the time they are very short journeys. More than half of these flights connect two cities less than 750 kilometers away, sometimes with less polluting solutions, such as the train between Paris-London or Paris-Geneva. Some journeys are even much shorter, which could easily be done by car, since last year there were 157 flights, for example between Nice and Cannes, while there are only about twenty kilometers between the two cities.
How can this rise in private jets be explained? It’s hard to give a single reason, but according to Greenpeace, the Covid played a big role. For two years, the large commercial companies grounded part of their fleet before experiencing difficulties in recruiting personnel. Conclusion: at the end of last year, global traffic had not yet returned to its pre-pandemic level, which probably prompted some customers, especially business customers, to turn to jets.