Persistent voluntary halving of academic flying suggests new mobility norms

Abstract Global passenger air traffic has rapidly rebounded after the lifting of COVID-19 travel restrictions, often exceeding pre-pandemic levels. However, evidence on whether business travel has undergone lasting, sector-specific reconfigurations remains scarce. Here we provide a large-scale post-pandemic sectoral analysis, focusing on academia, a highly airmobile sector but equipped with digital alternatives to physical travel. Using a comprehensive French national dataset covering more than 110 000 academic staff and nearly one million business trips between 2019 and 2024, we show that academic air travel has not rebounded but instead stabilized at around 50% of its pre-pandemic level. This decline holds across distances, research disciplines, and travel motives, and translates into a twofold reduction in travel-related greenhouse gas emissions, well beyond institutional climate targets. A decomposition indicates that this reduction is primarily driven by a contraction in flight frequency. Although rail travel declined relative to 2019, we document a marked air-to-rail modal shift at a continental scale and a relative increase in long-distance rail travel. Together, these patterns point to a durable reconfiguration of professional mobility norms rather than a demand contraction. The pronounced drop observed in this sector contrasts sharply with national and Western European air mobility trends, challenging narratives of an inevitable post-covid rebound. This reconfiguration of mobility patterns in academia also challenges influential notions such as the ‘knowledge-action gap’ and the ‘fly or die’ hypothesis, and provides new insights into the relationship between environmental awareness, professional constraints, and behavior. More broadly, the emergence of these new mobility norms, which occurred in the absence of binding regulations, highlights the role of social and organizational dynamics in driving low-carbon transitions and shaping mobility-related mitigation strategies.