Modelling the future: What the Middle East’s aviation pathways reveal
Using Boeing's Cascade model, industry leaders in Dubai ran the numbers. The result? A map of the trade-offs between growth, fuels, and economics on the path to net zero.
The Middle East believes it is aviation’s laboratory of the future. The region is adding new airports, planning record-breaking fleet renewals, and setting bold net-zero targets.
But ambition alone won’t decarbonise aviation. Decisions will. And as the latest workshop co-led by SimpliFlying and Boeing on the sidelines of the Dubai Airshow revealed, those decisions are far more complicated than the headlines suggest.
The session brought together airline leaders, airport executives, policymakers, and energy experts across the region for a live, data-driven modelling exercise. Using the Boeing Cascade Climate Impact Model, participants manipulated variables such as fleet age, renewable energy availability, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) uptake, passenger growth, and novel propulsion systems.
By evaluating multiple scenarios, the session revealed not merely what the region wants, but what the physics, economics, and timelines will realistically allow.
1. The growth paradox
Most participants assumed fuel choices would have the biggest influence on emissions outcomes. Yet, Cascade showed that traffic growth assumptions were just as consequential. In several group scenarios, even modest adjustments to projected demand enabled emissions reductions on par with those from ambitious SAF adoption.
As the aviation industry continues to grow, for a region like the Middle East, strong in global connectivity and passenger flows, Cascade was a reminder of the need to ensure low-emission pathways to continue growing responsibly. Tools such as optimised scheduling, improved connectivity planning, and long-term demand forecasting may become part of the toolkit, alongside renewable fuels and fleet modernisation.
2. SAF is the keystone and the bottleneck
The model confirmed what industry insiders already sense: SAF holds the greatest potential for emissions reductions through 2050, but bringing it to commercial scale is challenging.
For the first time in any Cascade session worldwide, Lower Carbon Aviation Fuel (LCAF), recently included in the app, became a flashpoint in Dubai:
Some teams argued it is essential to meet the UAE’s 2030 SAF mandate.
Others argued that LCAF delivered little emissions benefit by mid-century.
Read about our previous Cascade labs in Europe and the UK:
3. Hydrogen and electric aircraft: more signal than substance
While hydrogen and electric aircraft dominate conference stages, the region assigned minimal impact to both. Long-haul density, infrastructure timelines, and energy constraints make them marginal through 2050. Every team minimised the contribution of these levers, effectively treating them as secondary pathways in a long-haul, widebody context.
The takeaway: novel propulsion is a story about the 2060s, not the 2030s, and certainly not for the Middle East’s wide-body-dominated hubs.
4. Fleet renewal works but only as an enabler
Reducing aviation’s emissions always requires the right mix of strategies, selected per unique regional conditions. Scenarios developed at the workshop showed that even maximal renewal left an emissions gap to be filled with other strategies.
Operational levers such as advanced flight planning and next-gen aircraft consistently yielded meaningful emissions savings, often above 30%. The region is close to load-factor saturation, and further emission reductions require coordination, not just capital expenditure.
5. The elephant in the model: costs
Power-to-Liquid (PtL) fuels, clean electricity, and biomass compete across industries, and prices will determine whether scenarios survive political scrutiny.
As one attendee noted, “the model assumes infinite budget; the real world does not.” Ignoring cost helped the exercise move quickly but highlighted a looming reality: aviation decarbonisation only scales when the economics do.
What this means for the Middle East
The region now faces a strategic decision:
Will it use its solar advantage and refinery potential to become the world’s SAF engine, or will it risk building transitional fuel systems that fail to deliver long-term, responsible growth of aviation?
Dubai exposed three imperatives:
A regional roadmap for SAF scale-up, not fragmented national efforts;
Financing models for refinery build-out and energy-intensive PtL projects;
Growth-aligned planning as demand itself has become a climate lever.
The Middle East has the ingredients to lead. Whether it chooses to assemble them is now the defining question.
Next stop: Singapore!
The next Cascade Lab on the sidelines of the Singapore Airshow on February 5 will test a new equation centred on Asia-Pacific’s biomass and energy constraints. If Dubai was about possibility, Singapore will be about competition.
One thing is now clear: there is no single pathway to net-zero aviation. And the regions that move first will shape the markets everyone else depends on.
Special thanks to Boeing for their trust and collaboration and to every participant who brought curiosity, rigour, and insight to the sessions.