The aviation industry was built through war and state power—around politics, in other words. Building something else will be political, too.
In February 2025, Airbus postponed the development of its much-publicized hydrogen aircraft—once confidently promised for 2035—by up to a decade, suspending testing and cutting the project’s funding. The reversal was handled discreetly: no press conference, no headline-grabbing announcement, just a carefully worded email. On Airbus’s website, the company continues to affirm its “ambition” to build a hydrogen plane, only now the delivery date has quietly evaporated. Admittedly, the aircraft—likely a small-scale testbed for no more than 100 passengers—was in the short term never expected to reverse the sector’s escalating emissions. But the pattern of deferral is hard to ignore; Airbus had already scrapped its E-Fan X hybrid-electric programme in 2020 (ironically to pivot toward hydrogen), a project launched with some optimism just three years before.
Broken promises like this are part of a longer story. Since the 1990s there have been many technological breakthroughs proposed to make flying more climate friendly. In the 2000s, it was laminar flow designs that were presented as the next great efficiency leap, while the 2010s had carbon-composite aircraft and electric flight. None of these futures materialized. Still, they tend to linger in public discourse, until they are quietly replaced by the next shiny solution, yet another technological myth that displaces political decisions in the present by projecting solutions into an ever-receding future.
Then again, the jet aircraft itself was once dismissed as unrealistic: too costly and commercially unviable. What then seemed unthinkable eventually became true: machines weighing hundreds of tonnes smoothly lifting themselves into the air, carrying passengers across continents, and compressing vast distances into a few hours—made possible by burning extraordinary quantities of fossil fuel. In doing so, the jet aircraft remade the world. The real question in the story of jet development, however, is not how air travel became technically possible, but why this specific technology emerged. What are the political dynamics, economic interests and material energy flows that made it viable and continue to sustain it? And why is moving beyond fossil fuels so exceptionally difficult for the aviation sector?
Fossil Fuels Take Off
For most of human history, flying across oceans was simply implausible. People may have dreamed of flight for centuries, experimenting with gliders, balloons and fantastical flying machines, but these remained bound by hard physical limits. Moving from those fragile experiments to a world in which intercontinental air travel is routine, at least for a rich global minority, depended on the utilization of fossil energy.