Posted April 24, 2009 11:01 AM
By Jake Reppert
Flying in the Face of Change
The aviation industry has seen and been a part of some of the most powerful and exciting developments that have helped create what is today a global economy. As part of the aviation industry Ascend has seen the development of the 747 and the A380, the creation of route networks that circumnavigate the globe, and who knows how many business cycles. What we haven’t seen, but now find ourselves in the midst of, is a business community that is becoming increasingly aware of, and active in dealing with the issues that affect our world, the parts outside of P&L statements. I say this not to belittle the accomplishments of companies that take every step possible, down to insisting upon duplex printing or recycling, but to underline the increasing visibility of green projects in our industry.
In my final semester before university I was fortunate enough to take a class with Marilyn Doerr, author of Currerre and the Environmental Biology: a Phenomenological Approach to the Teaching of Biology. Through this class I was encouraged to combine the study of the natural world with the study of aviation with the goal of creating solutions to environmental issues that were fiscally and environmentally responsible. The suggestions I made in my report will most likely prove to be irrelevant to the future of the aviation industry.
This brings us to the issue of the aviation industry. We can be certain that planes will keep getting bigger, planes will keep getting smaller, and we’ll continue to have more and more of the ones in the middle, this has been the case throughout the history of our industry, but, if we’re lucky, we may just be on the verge of a revolution that brings us technologies that are mutually beneficial to the environment and the bottom line.
We talk with clients on a daily basis that are using our database in non-traditional ways, and more and more we are hearing our users talk about emissions and emissions trading, and using our database to deal with issues around the environment. We see this use as just one more step in the evolution of our database, which began as a tool for insurance companies, found a second home in the aircraft finance sector, and is proving to be a useful tool for environmental work.
When you think of the next several decades in our industry, you can be certain that we will see more of the same in business cycles and aircraft development programs. However, the next few workforce generations in the aviation industry have a very unique opportunity to bring the interests of our industry and our environment closer together. This is one unique opportunity that my colleagues and I are very excited to be a part of.
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