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It's illegal to tax fuel for international flights. Domestic fuel is already taxed but the Chicago Convention in 1944 set the ground rules for the ICAO and international air travel.

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Doesn’t it only cover fuel that is already on board when the plane lands ?

And the Chicago Convention seems to have been revised 8 times already (according to Wikipedia) so it’s not set in stone.

It covers fuel on board and fuel leaving the country.

My naive reading is that it prohibits double taxing (taxing fuel already purchased). Are you saying that when fuel my aircraft they ask the destination so they can gauge the tax?

Yep. I used to fuel planes, international flights have INTL EXEMPT on the fuel slip.

A possible alternative would be to tax carbon emissions

to the extent this is possible, this is probably the best solution, since emissions are not directly proportional to number of passengers or even fuel use.

Note also that it has only recently been established that water vapor emitted at cruising altitude has an unexpectedly long residence time and thus an unexpectedly high GWP, perhaps as much as the CO_2 emitted, thus doubling the impact over that same amount of fuel burnt at ground level.

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