Environmental Footprint of Private and Business Jets †

Civil aviation contributes to rising global greenhouse gas emissions. Flights carried out by private and business jets are only a very small fraction of commercial passenger flights. However, these private flights are extremely environmentally inefficient and account for the most emissions per passenger in the aviation sector. While the commercial aviation sector has been under increased scrutiny by environmentalists for years, the footprint of private and business jets has entered the public eye only very recently. Social media provides new ways for sharing individual private flights, but the large-scale analysis of private jet flights and their emissions has been lacking until now. To better inform this discussion, we use open and large-scale flight data collected by the OpenSky Network over fours years and apply the OpenAP model in order to estimate the emissions of around 250 private jets. The total carbon emissions is found to be between 0.45 and 0.5 megatonnes. The yearly emissions from these selected jets is equivalent to 40,000 global inhabitant emissions. In our analysis, we provide further insight into private jet emissions and raise awareness about the emission inequalities in the current aviation system.