In 2019, 100 years of aviation in the Netherlands is celebrated. Reason for BNR Nieuwsradio to devote a week’s attention to the state of aviation in the Netherlands. With Floris de Haan, senior researcher in Air Transport economics at Erasmus Centre for Urban, Port and Transport Economics and lecturer at Erasmus School of Economics, the future of aviation in the Netherlands, Schiphol, Lelystad airport and KLM are, among other things, discussed.
Everyone flies, but in the back of our minds there is voice that increasingly asks if it is still possible. There is no sector where the dilemma is so obvious in all its aspects: economic growth vs. sustainability. According to De Haan, aviation certainly has a future in the Netherlands. ‘However, that will be a different future than the history of the past decades, in which we have seen a lot of growth. You see very clearly that the negative effects of aviation are gaining in importance. So, the CO2 footprint, noise, external safety, fine particles, but also the tourism that aviation brings with it and which causes disturbance in big cities.’
‘We are at a turning point, because suddenly we no longer have unlimited capacity to allow aviation to grow, which has certainly been the case in the Netherlands in recent decades. We are also at a turning point when it comes to climate awareness. The Dutch government is now also trying to lay this down in a vision. So, I think we could mark 2019 as a turnaround in aviation.
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Listen to the entire item on BNR Nieuwsradio, 10 September 2019 (in Dutch).