Gabriel Hanot is a senior aviation consultant and founder of GH Aviation Consulting, advising on sustainable aviation and airline strategy after nearly 20 years at Airbus, spanning aircraft design, customer support, commercial sales, and business strategy consulting. He was part of the team that helped launch Vistara, a new airline built from a joint venture between Singapore and Indian partners, and led the campaign that brought Airbus's first aircraft into Japan Airlines' fleet. Today his work centers on decarbonization, from electric propulsion to sustainable aviation fuel, and he's serving as chairman of this year's Global Aviation Conference in Frankfurt.
Key Takeaways
- Clean flying will cost more, and the industry won't move there on its own. Government policy, not market forces, is what will ultimately drive the shift.
- Small-scale decarbonization is possible by 2030, even as full industry-wide net-zero stays targeted at 2050.
- Contrails may be an overlooked quick win. Their climate impact may rival or exceed aviation's carbon emissions.
- AI has limits in a physics-driven industry. It can speed up computation, not replace real research.
Q: What pulled you into aviation, and why did you end up on the consulting and strategy side of it rather than engineering?
Hanot: I took my first actual flight only once I was already in engineering school, aeronautics wasn't something my family could afford growing up. But I was always drawn to planes as a kid, playing with paper aircraft, fascinated by physics. Something heavier than air manages to fly, and I wanted to understand why.
I studied engineering and started at Airbus in the design office. Airbus is big enough that you get to move around, try different things. I went into operations, then commercial, working directly with airlines to sell them aircraft. Eventually I joined Airbus's internal consulting team, and that was the real discovery for me. Consulting is much wider than engineering, it pulls in economics, history, geography, understanding how a country or an industry actually works. That used to be something I did for fun, reading, trying to understand the world. Consulting let me do that as my job. Strategy work means understanding many subjects instead of mastering one, staying curious, working closely with people. It fits how my mind works.
Q: You were part of building Vistara, a brand-new airline in India, from scratch. What did that actually involve?
Hanot: Vistara was a joint venture, fifty-fifty between Singaporean and Indian partners, and it's since merged into Air India. Supporting an airline's growth was always part of our work at Airbus, a growing airline buys more aircraft, so it made sense for us to help.
What struck me was the energy. We were working out of Gurgaon, near Delhi, a district full of tech companies, and the pace was intense compared to what I was used to in Europe. Every time we came back, there was a new building going up, and the Vistara team itself had doubled in size. Setting up the airline took about a year and a half. Getting the first crew hired, the first aircraft flying, that's genuinely rewarding, a huge team effort you can actually see the results of. I came back a few years later for a separate project with them, and I still keep in touch with people from that time. One intern I trained back then is now VP of network planning at Air India. Watching that trajectory has been remarkable.
The hardest part was keeping pace. When you're working with a team moving that fast, you need to bring something genuinely valuable, real deliverables, not just conversation. There's no time to sit and explain yourself, you need to show up with solid work.
Q: Most of the industry talks about net-zero by 2050. How realistic is meaningful progress before then?
Hanot: A century ago, engineers solved the challenge of flight itself. Later, they made flying affordable for a large part of the world. The challenge now is making the industry clean, and it has to happen — this summer alone was a reminder of what's ahead if we don't act, and it's likely to get worse before it gets better.
For part of the industry, progress is already happening. There are technical solutions today — smaller aircraft that can fly on electricity. That won't transform the whole sector; it's a minor share of total activity, but it proves the technology works, and that proof can extend to a larger part of the market over time. Sustainable aviation fuel is moving in the same direction, cleaner than fossil fuel, even if it's not perfect.
The real bottleneck is uncertainty. Flying clean costs more, so the industry won't move there on its own without government leadership, incentives, and regulation. And uncertainty about what those rules will actually look like creates uncertainty in investment. Cleaner fuel and new aircraft types could eventually be genuinely affordable solutions, but scaling them requires capital, and capital requires confidence that the business will be profitable. Right now, that clear, shared path isn't there. If governments, industry, and regulators actually agreed on the direction and committed to it, I think the investment would follow.
Q: What project is keeping you busy right now?
Hanot: We're currently working on a decarbonization strategy for an airline, helping them plan toward net-zero by 2050. You can't wait until 2049 and declare zero emissions the following year; it takes years of planning. If you want to rely heavily on sustainable aviation fuel or carbon offsets, for example, sometimes that means investing early in promising projects so you can secure those products at a better price down the line. All of that has to be planned years in advance.
The tricky part is that most airlines right now are focused on surviving the next six months, understandably, given fuel prices. I get the short-term pressure completely. But the challenge is keeping part of the organization's attention on the long-term too. If nobody does, I worry aviation eventually gets treated as too harmful to allow at the scale it operates today. I'd hate to see that, flying clean matters too much, both for the industry and for everything it makes possible.
Q: Is there something happening in aviation right now that you think isn't getting enough attention?
Hanot: Fuel prices are dominating attention because of the current crisis, and I think that's pulled the focus away from sustainability more broadly. One subject in particular doesn't get enough attention: the non-CO2 effect, essentially the contrails planes leave behind. By some estimates, that effect may have close to twice the climate impact of the carbon aircraft actually emit.
What's interesting is that some experts believe it's not that difficult to meaningfully reduce this effect by purifying the kerosene used onboard, or adjusting flight paths to avoid the specific areas where these contrails form most. I'm not an expert on the science myself, and we're still building a better understanding of it, but if the goal is less climate impact, this looks like a comparatively quick win. It's probably easier to address than carbon emissions themselves, and I think it deserves more urgency than it's currently getting.
Q: Do you think AI has a role to play there, or in decarbonization more broadly?
Hanot: We use AI a lot in our work, but I don't trust it for physics. Physics has laws; AI is fundamentally a probability machine. It can speed up certain tasks, computations, for instance, but it's not magic, and it can't override the rules it's working within. I don't think AI will be the solution on its own. We still need to study, think, and do the research ourselves. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but the work of actually solving problems is still ours to do. I'm not convinced a shortcut here is really a shortcut.
Q: What's a moment in your career you're genuinely proud of, or one of the hardest things you've had to work through?
Hanot: Two moments come to mind. The first was selling Airbus aircraft to Japan Airlines – their very first Airbus purchase after years of buying exclusively from Boeing. We had to earn their trust from nothing, and in Japan, trust carries more weight than a signed contract. Working with them taught me a lot, about respect, humility, and how differently business can be conducted. My counterparts and I built that relationship, and I think it genuinely contributed to their decision to buy from us. Seeing those aircraft fly today, I'm proud of that.
The second is building my own company. It's a bit like becoming a parent a second time: you create something, and then you watch it grow, see people getting good at what they do, enjoying their work, and you see the hard parts, too. I know it could all change one day, but so far it's working, and that matters to me. It's also a daily challenge, nothing about it ever feels finished. Every day, I ask myself honestly: did I do something worthwhile today? I picked that habit up once I moved into consulting, where the work is short-cycle and you have to stay sharp; it's easy to spend a day in meetings at a big company and realize afterward you didn't actually move anything forward. I don't like that feeling, so I check myself on it daily.
Q: You've been asked to chair the Global Aviation Conference in Frankfurt this year. What are you hoping to get out of it, and what topics are you most looking forward to?
Hanot: First, I hope people genuinely enjoy it and walk away having learned something. Some conferences end up being speakers selling their own products; I'd rather this one be a place where people actually get up to speed on what's happening across the industry. You get a real concentration of stakeholders in one place: airlines, airports, MROs, and I'm hoping for honest, useful information and real discussion, not pitches.
Personally, I'm looking forward to talking with all the speakers and panellists – the range of subjects is genuinely wide: sustainability, operations, commercial strategy, market outlook. My own particular interest is sustainable aviation fuel and how the aviation market is likely to evolve, but I'm curious about everything on the agenda.
My biggest challenge on the day will probably be logistics, keeping things dynamic, keeping the schedule on time, making sure there's room to breathe between sessions. People notice and appreciate it when a conference actually runs on schedule.
