The forthcoming electric revolution in the aviation industry has its own questions which should stimulate serious thinking among airport community members. Airport projects involve huge capital outlays and are usually fixed costs. So in preparing for the future, aviation managers, especially in Africa, need a combination of ambidexterity and scenario planning.
Harvard Business Review talks about ambidextrous organisations as allowing executives to pioneer radical or disruptive innovations and at the same time pursuing innovative gains. It states further that ambidextrous managers are executives that have capacity for understanding as well as being sensitive to the needs of different kinds of businesses.
A quality that these managers have is that of rigorous cost cutting and being free thinking entrepreneurs, who, at the same time, maintain the objectivity very much needed to make difficult trade-offs. This attribute is needed as the aviation industry strives to tackle the difficult question of the use of air taxis and electric planes.
Scenario planning is a process that the United States military pioneered. It helps recognize and mitigate risks as well as plan for growth situations. It is about visualising different ways of looking at the future of an organisation. This is done by making assumptions of the forces that drive the market for which some may be good and others bad.
Scenario planning helps decision makers to identify ranges of potential outcomes and estimated impacts, evaluate responses and manage for both positive and negative possibilities. Some of the actions that take place would be projecting financial earnings, estimating cash flows, as well as developing actions for mitigation, among others.
Tad Mcgeer, a Stanford University PhD from the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics believes that electric aircraft can never be more than expensive toys – this is food for thought that calls up the need for ambidexterity and scenario planning.
He goes back to the history of such hypes as we are getting now in aviation – the Very Light Jets. About two decades ago, he goes on to say, there was a hype over electric aviation as an innovation. They were to offer affordable air – taxi service to everyone and would use every community airport, obviously in America. However the hype faded, orders for these jets evaporated and also startups closed shop as their venture capital ran out.
He goes further to state that while electric vehicles were practical for cars, this was not so for aircraft. The best batteries, he says, are more than ten fold heavier than gasoline per unit of energy delivered. The battery pack that will be needed to travel a given distance would be about sixteen times heavier than the equivalent tank of gasoline. This is tolerable for a car to switch from gasoline to batteries. In a Tesla car, for instance, battery weight is about forty percent of total mass – which is a large number.
Where an aircraft has to use electric power and will have to carry a load over any distance at all, then physically and economically battery power was out of the question. It would be prohibitively heavy. The same applies to urban air taxis with vertical take-off and landing – the issues around high cost and limited performance which affected the viability of helicopters for urban air mobility still have not been resolved.
Now the question of sustainability comes up: ‘If batteries cannot make aviation sustainable, then what?’ The best answer he suggests is to electrify things that are not so weight – sensitive. In this case, effort towards aviation sustainability would not be on electric aircraft but on electric cars, boats and trains. Another possible option for airlines would be ‘liquid hydrogen, electrolyzed and distributed from a formidable new infrastructure of power plants’.
So the airport community will look at putting in a lot of effort towards planning, research and data on a continuous basis to derive benefits from scenario planning and ambidexterity going forward. This will ensure that they are prepared for whatever outcome the industry meets with in the future.
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