For Aviation Lead Mark Boone, finding ways to reduce the Aviation Industry’s reliance on fossil fuels and the stigma associated with aviation will help more people to explore other cultures and connect with friends and family. We sat down to discuss the impacts that he and his team are making, and hope to make.

What motivates you in your career, and what drove you to work in Aviation? 

The thing that motivates me the most in my career is developing elegant solutions to complex problems. Working at an airport (a mini city really!) means that there is a wide variety of challenges to be overcome.

My start at airports was quite unintentional. I had been trained to use Microstation at a previous employer and the company that I got hired into had a big piece of work at Toronto – Pearson International Airport which was a Microstation shop. While I had joined MMM Group as a highway designer, I found myself designing and drafting the new airfield roads associated with the development of Terminal 1 (T-New as it was called then…) in my first assignment and really never looked back.

What are you hoping to change in your industry?

I’m anticipating a future in aviation that is less reliant on fossil fuels and increasingly more reliant on bio-fuels and electricity to power flight. I can’t yet see a day where fossil fuels are completely eliminated, but their use will be more targeted for long haul flights and perhaps come with a premium price tag. I can picture a future where a flight from Sydney to Melbourne will be on an electrically or hydrogen powered aircraft however. I’m not sure that airports realise what an electrified fleet of aircraft and vehicles truly means to their power distribution infrastructure and how they will need to adapt. This is an area that we can provide leadership and guidance.

How would this change impact people or society? 

Shedding the flight shaming associated with air travel would have a significant impact on people and society by eliminating barriers to exploring all that the world has to offer in terms of cultural exploration and just plain staying in contact with friends and loved ones. Aviation is such a powerful connector of cities and people and helps to make the world feel just a little bit smaller.

While the contribution of greenhouse gases by the airline sector is modest (at about 3% of total emissions globally), the movement to greener fuel sources on short to medium haul flights is important and will reduce this impact significantly. The technological innovations in batteries, hydrogen fuel cells and bio-fuels will be the foundation on which the savings are realised. WSP doesn’t develop any of these technologies, however staying up to date with these developments and finding ways to incorporate them into our project responses is exactly what our Future Ready mindset is all about in my mind.

What are some of the barriers to this change, and how are you/your team working around them? 

I think that the biggest barrier to change is the uncertainty around when the tipping point toward electrification will arrive. Airports and the airlines that provide a significant amount of the funding for infrastructure development will not be interested in making investments in micro-grids and expanding connectivity to the grid only to see it sitting idle waiting for the electric car and aircraft market to catch up. I believe that taking a staged approach is the way to go. Introducing storage (batteries) into the system to take advantage of renewable energy sources and off-peak energy pricing would be a positive first step that would provide immediate returns.