Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport Says Private Jets ‘No Longer Welcome’

Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, one of the largest in Europe, has announced that it will become ‘quieter, cleaner and better’ in a plan drawn up to look after people and the local environment in a better way—the statement says that it will reduce the quantity of air traffic and apply greater regulation on the types of traffic that is allowed to land.

In a move that will be a major blow to some travelers and businesses, the plans intend that:

• no planes will be allowed to land between midnight and 5am.
• no planes will be allowed to take off between the hours of midnight and 6am.
• the noisiest types of aircraft will not be allowed.
• private jets will no longer be welcome.
• an intended further runway will not be built.

The new plans will come into effect no later than 2025 to 2026 and are intended to protect the local population and the environment by reducing noise pollution and carbon emissions in line with the responsibilities agreed under the Paris Climate Agreement.

With these 10,000 fewer night flights per year, Schiphol airport believes that 16% fewer people (around 17,500) will suffer from extreme noise nuisance and the number of local residents that experience sleep disturbance will fall by up to 54%.

It also intends to ban private jets and small aviation business, due to the disproportionate amount of carbon emissions they produce—something that environmental campaigners across Europe are becoming increasingly militant about in their campaigning.

The World Travel & Tourism Council recently reported that the travel industry generates between 8% to 11% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions—much of which comes from transport. There were calls made at a recent Abta travel convention in Morocco for a rapid de-carbonisation of the industry.

A recent study highlighted the immense differences that travel can make to an individual’s environmental impact. Nicknamed the ‘polluting elite’ by Oxfam, many high-polluting individuals (in the U.K., these are the top 1% of earners, earning more than £170,000 per year) are responsible for the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions in just one year, as the bottom 10% of earners produce in 26 years.

Additionally, Schiphol airport has carried out research into popular destinations for its travelers using private jet. With 30% to 50% of these private jets heading to places such as Ibiza, Cannes and Innsbruck, it is satisfied that these destinations are already well-served by scheduled plane services and there is no need to use private jets.

There are similar calls being made in France to introduce taxes on carbon rich activities such as flying and to ban private jets, particularly as France has a very high number of journeys on private jets that end in its territory.

France is one of the first EU countries to ban short-haul flights—where a train journey is possible in under two and half hours. According to Le Monde’s calculations, a private jet traveling from Paris to the south of France (which has been the most frequent private jet trip in 2022) consumers four times more carbon emissions per person than when traveling on a commercial airplane and 800 times more than the train.

With the rising cost of living and a looming environmental crisis, private jets are increasingly becoming a political issue. For instance, whilst half of people in the U.K. might take just one flight a year, it is 1% of the population that account for one-fifth of all international flights leaving the U.K. in any given year.

Along with London Heathrow, Paris Charles de Gaulle and Germany Frankfurt, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport is one of the busiest in Europe—with over 72 million passengers.