Luke Taylor

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group for the future of aviation, travel and aerospace, I very much welcome this step to push the aviation industry into a sustainable future. I encourage Members to join the APPG and come along to our meetings if they want to find out more about sustainability and the future of aviation. I worked in the aviation industry for 16 years before being elected to this place, and I studied aeronautical engineering for four years before that, so it would have been remiss of me not to come to the Chamber today to share with hon. Members my expertise on the subject, but I will try not bore them. I welcome the support for future technology and the investment previously announced by the Government. We have massive and historical expertise in aviation here in Great Britain and Northern Ireland and we really must grasp the opportunity to develop those skills and that technology further. It is an incredible opportunity for UK plc and we need to grasp it. I want to pick up on a comment by the Secretary of State in her opening speech about airspace modernisation, because it is relevant to the discussion. We must grasp the opportunities of airspace modernisation, which have the potential, as she mentioned, to deliver shorter, more direct and more efficient flight routes. But as MPs, we must engage with the process. We must understand and learn about how that is happening around us. It is inevitable, but we must get the best for our communities. We must understand and engage with that process as it goes along. It is an incredible opportunity. Over the past few months, the APPG has been hearing about the technologies that we have today. Of particular interest is ZeroAvia, which is already flying a hydrogen-electric, zero-emission aircraft in the UK—it has a hydrogen fuel cell with electrical propulsion, which offers completely zero-emission flight. As my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Mr Kohler) mentioned, this is only a stepping stone to the truly zero-emission flight that we really need to capture. If hon. Members will forgive me for boring them slightly, the Breguet range equations that I learnt about for my degree are the reason why an Airbus A380 will take off from London at 580 tonnes and land in Sydney at around 340 tonnes. The burning of fuel throughout the journey means that it is able to maintain the range and maintain the flight levels that the burning of the fuel and the reduction in the weight require. That is one reason why liquid fuel will almost always be required for very long-haul flights, no matter how far we progress with hydrogen and electrical power plants for short and medium-haul flights. That amplifies the need not just for the current second-generation SAF production, but for looking at alternative fuel sources such as algae-derived SAF. Others have correctly made the point about the reduction in residual waste, which is the current fuel source for a lot of biodiesel for the development of SAF. As those sources decrease and the cost potentially increases, we need to look at truly zero-carbon sources of SAF. I will not bore hon. Members more. In closing, I will just echo the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon and of my party and encourage the Minister to go further and faster to achieve truly zero-carbon and lower-noise aviation technology so that we can continue to enjoy the incredible freedoms and opportunities in both economic activity—jobs, skills and trade—and the broadened horizons that aviation has offered us for more than a century. Long may it continue.