The Airbus Concept Plane (Image Airbus)

Air travelers want to have their cake and eat it too.

A survey by Airbus has revealed that a majority of travelers expect to fly more in the future but are concerned about the environmental impacts of air travel as well as the noise of jets and the stress of flying.

The results of the two-year consultation Airbus had with more than 1.75 million people worldwide found that:

• 63 per cent of people said they would fly more by 2050
  
• 96 per cent believed aircraft would need to be more sustainable or ‘eco-efficient’
  
• 66 per cent wanted quieter aircraft and 65 per cent, planes that were fully recyclable
  
• Almost 40 per cent thought (door-to-door) air travel was becoming increasingly stressful

With 60 per cent of those surveyed believing that social media would not replace the need to see people face-to-face, Airbus Executive Vice President of Engineering Charles Champion said there was still nothing better than “face to face contact”, calling aviation “the real World Wide Web”.

But as more people took to the skies more often, Mr Champion said the higher their expectations would be for the “end-to-end passenger experience”.

Confirming this, the Airbus consultation highlighted a ‘predictable’ list of gripes such as airport queues, slow check-in and baggage collection, delayed departures and holding patterns around airports.

“In London for example we’ve seen concern about queues at airports and people are understandably not happy about it,” he said.  

“But the reality is those capacity constraints are a sign of things to come unless the industry can work together to cut delays, and with aviation set to double in the next 15 years, that’s what we’re looking at.”

Meanwhile, Airbus announced this week that since its debut in 1988, the A320 Family aircraft has carried some 7 billion passengers - the equivalent of the current world population.