Why Massport's Sustainable Aviation Hype Doesn't Fly

On January 28th, new Massport CEO Rich Davey joined Hanscom-area Select Board members for the first time at a virtual HATS (Hanscom Area Town Selectboards) meeting. About 45 participants attended, including Massport officials from Hanscom Field civilian airport, as well as a number of our state representatives who engaged in vigorous exchanges with Davey about the proposed private jet hangar expansion at Hanscom and the viability of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAFs). SAFs have been heavily promoted by the prospective Hanscom developers and by Davey as the solution for greening aviation, which is more widely believed to be brazen greenwashing to justify the aviation industry’s plans for indefinite growth.

HATS attendees were hopeful that Davey would speak directly to the proposed expansion of Hanscom Field (not to be confused with Hanscom Air Force Base). If the proposed expansion goes forward, private jet emissions from Hanscom alone could cancel nearly 70% of the climate gains from all solar photovoltaics installed in Massachusetts.

In the meeting, Davey quickly tried to direct conversation to the use of Sustainable Aviation Fuels (SAF)s, which many experts consider to be flights of fancy. Davey said, “You know, almost 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions at Logan Airport are fuel, and that's a huge challenge.” Davey attempted to assure the crowd that Massport has a discerning eye about which SAFs to employ, and that if the right ones were selected, they may “solve the challenge [of aviation emissions] permanently.”

This meeting followed on the heels of a statewide January 8 webinar for policy-makers and the public, “Sustainable Aviation Fuels: Can They Meet 2050 Climate Goals?” hosted by Sierra Club Mass and sponsored by Mass Power Forward, Massachusetts Climate Action Network (MCAN); Institute for Policy Studies, Program on Inequality, Stop Private Jet Expansion at Hanscom or Anywhere (SPJE), and Center for Biological Diversity. The webinar challenged the notion of SAFs as a “silver bullet solution” for making aviation sustainable.

As independent panelists pointed out in the webinar, SAFs will not be available at scale by 2050, and producing SAFs can be extremely destructive to food production and an enormous burden on the electric grid – regardless of whether they are actually clean or green. One panelist, Chuck Collins from the Institute for Policy Studies, said, “When you hear the phrase ‘sustainable aviation fuels’ we want you to be like a consumer in a store where you see ‘natural foods.’ You have to really get in there and understand the ingredients” Collins concluded, “Based on our research, there is no scalable alternative to kerosene-based jet fuels that will move at the pace of climate change to offset these harms.”

In response to Davey's SAF presentation at the January 28 HATS meeting, Christopher Eliot, the chair of the Hanscom Field Advisory Commission (HFAC), said “I think there's been this massive propaganda machine supporting SAF and it looks like eventually everybody buckles just because of the amount of propaganda in support of it. I don't believe it has the technical merit,” and proceeded to discuss the ways that SAFs would wreak havoc on the current systems we rely on for survival, if implemented.

Adding to Eliot’s comments, Jim Hutchinson, a member of the Lincoln Select Board and HATS, pointed out that even if Davey’s ambitions were scalable in the near future, he has no power to implement SAF, pointing out that “even if you had SAF, you can’t make jets that use the airports that you control use it. You’re not allowed to require them to use SAF. And in general, [the] FAA doesn’t seem that interested in managing CO2 emission.”

Last spring’s inadequate Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) that the proposed Hanscom Field expansion’s developers submitted to the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act Office (MEPA) was also under heavy debate. Representative Ken Gordon said to Mr. Davey, “We're hoping that if the filing [the developers put forward is irresponsibly inadequate] even one more time, but there's no attempt to actually answer the question, that you will consider that seriously in your decisions on moving forward for this project.”

Fellow Representative Simon Cataldo agreed, saying, “At what point does Massport Just Say No based on the inadequacy [of the DEIR]? I mean, there was no credible, reasonable response to Secretary Tepper questions. Just a tiny bit of pressure testing, and you went right through almost everything that they [the developers] were saying.”

Other participants at the HATS meeting were concerned about the potential implications of an expansion that aims to serve the ultra-wealthy at the expense of surrounding neighborhoods and our climate. “I think if you were to do this (expand Hanscom Field) now, Massport would become the face of Trumpism in Massachusetts,” said State Senator Mike Barrett, an outspoken dissenter of the proposed Hanscom expansion. “If a decision is made to move forward in this current polarized, political climate, it will have ramifications, just in terms of people’s sense of well being, and sense of faith that Massachusetts can steer its own independent course. So I want to plead with you to think about some of the larger implications of this decision.”

Mark Sandeen, HATS Chair and Lexington Select Board Member, stated “If the proponents of the North Airfield expansion were able to expand that 495,000 square feet of hangar space… that would generate more emissions than all of the houses and all of the cars in Lexington, Bedford, Concord, and Lincoln combined (…) So when you're looking at a group of people here who’ve dedicated decades of their lives to reducing the emissions in their towns, and to see one project wipe out any possibility of success in terms of lowering our emissions in our four towns, we don't view that as small.”

At the end of the HATS meeting, Christopher Eliot concluded, “I've been studying Hanscom Field for about 10 years (...) and really the only thing that's acceptable to anybody, or practically anybody, here - is the status quo. There's nobody, there's no public official, there's no leader of any civic group that's called for the reduction or elimination of the airport, and there's none who would have any tolerance for the expansion.”

It seems that Massport is hoping that the distraction of Sustainable Aviation Fuels will keep the public from pushing too hard against the proposed Hanscom expansion (or other airport expansion) until it’s too late to do anything to stop it. However, they’re going to have to try a lot harder if they want to get past us.