From today's Sunday Times.
John Humphrys: Clipping the
airlines' wings would do us all a favour
The death of the airline industry was announced in those dark days following September 11. If not the death, then at least the end of its extraordinary growth. The new fear of flying would see to it. For once it seemed that the gloomy forecasters had it right. Americans stayed at home. If you were brave enough to cross the Atlantic you could
travel in roomy comfort — even in the ghetto of economy class.
Each bulletin brought news of another airline going bust. Those national carriers that managed to struggle on cancelled so many orders for new planes that Boeing sacked thousands of people. So did the airlines. Some said they were pulling a fast one. They’d been losing so much money that they were already in serious trouble and they were blaming the terrorists to try to squeeze compensation from their governments. My, but it’s a cynical old world.
There’s no denying that it has been a tough time for the airline industry. Six thousand people who worked at Heathrow — one tenth
of the workforce — lost their jobs. So what, pray, are they doing announcing a new terminal at Heathrow? Have they gone mad? Here we have an industry on its knees and the government blithely announces that it has accepted the recommendations of a planning
inquiry to go ahead with a massive project that will cost a fortune and blight the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who live near the airport.
No, they have not gone mad. The terminal will be built because an inquiry was persuaded that it is needed. It was right. However much
the most badly managed airlines may bleat and whine, air travel is not on its knees. Its death has been prematurely announced.
Unless, God forbid, there is a repeat of the New York horror, it will continue to do what it has been doing for half a century. It will grow and grow and grow. And that is a crying shame.
To say its growth has been extraordinary is an understatement. In its first year Heathrow handled 63,000 passengers travelling on 2,000
flights to 18 destinations. Last year it handled 62m passengers travelling on more than 1,000 flights a day to 220 destinations. In the next 10 to 15 years it is estimated that the number of people travelling through all British airports will double. By the middle of the century this figure may increase tenfold.
That is great news for the industry and especially for the only people who are making any money at the moment, the low-cost operators, but it’s bad news for almost everyone else.
We all smiled at the silliness when a European court ruled last month that our human rights included the right to a decent night’s sleep and that right was infringed by night flights. But there is nothing funny about aircraft noise. Studies show that children who live under flight paths suffer from poor memory and have greater difficulty learning to read. And it’s no good saying that people knew what to expect when they bought their houses. Many did not.
Over the years people living near airports have been consistently misled with false promises about the number of flights.
We all pay a price for air travel. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says aircraft are responsible for a sizeable chunk of the pollution that causes global warming. The more flights, the more fuel burnt, the bigger the contribution. The new generation of sonic cruisers that will fly in the stratosphere at 45,000ft are going to damage the ozone layer, too. So that will add to the risk of skin cancer when we finally flop on to the beaches we have flown halfway
around the world to get to.
Ah . . . the beaches. What would all those foreign countries do if we stopped flying to their beaches? The World Travel and Tourism
Council estimates that foreign holidays of one sort or another account for no less than 11% of global GDP. It has produced scary
figures showing how many jobs would be lost and how different countries would suffer if there were even a modest fall in tourism. I
wonder.
The estimate assumes that we would stop spending the money. I can’t help feeling that we might spend it on something else instead.
We might buy things from shops — things that have to be made in factories. Or we might even spend a bit more on holidays in this
country. I wonder how many people have never been to Scotland or even God’s own country on the other side of the Severn Bridge.
Good for us, maybe, but not so good for some of the world’s poorest countries. We are told they would be in great trouble without all that revenue from foreign tourists. Again, I wonder. The most popular holidays are still package deals, and a great appeal of package deals is that you know what they will cost you. You know because almost everything is paid for in advance.
You end up in a compound (optional sentries and watch towers) where you eat, drink and make merry. The food and the booze may well have been imported by the owners of the compounds. Hence there is no incentive to go and risk a gippy tummy by eating something dodgy at the bar in the village nearby. So the local economy gets nothing out of it — except a few jobs at rock-bottom wages for the young women who clean the rooms.
A couple of years ago the Gambia got fed up with it and tried to ban all-inclusive holidays. Most of its holidaymakers were British. They simply went elsewhere — many of them to the Caribbean, where they found what they wanted. Last year the Gambians backed down. Holidaymakers can now enjoy all-inclusive packages there with the added bonus that high perimeter fences keep out all those young hustlers who try to sell them things. Can’t have the locals spoiling our holiday, can we? And if each guest in those air-conditioned hotels uses more water in a week than the average local family would have used in a year . . . well, there’s always a price to pay.
But, of course, travel broadens the mind. Maybe real travel does. Modern tourism narrows it. The old cliché of the Red Barrel- swigging lout on the Spanish costa dies hard. Some years ago the king of Spain remarked wryly that the British ought to give Gibraltar back now that we had taken over the Costa del Sol.
Flying is not the great liberator that we had imagined it would be. It has made possible a new kind of cultural imperialism. It pollutes the atmosphere. It makes life hell for people living under flight paths.
And yet we still treat the industry with an exaggerated respect and grant it concessions enjoyed by no other industry.
Fill your small car with petrol to drive to your granny’s and most of the bill for it goes in fuel duties. Governments defend the tax by saying we should use cars less to protect the environment. Fill a vast jumbo with fuel to fly a bunch of businessmen across the Atlantic and the airline pays not a penny in tax. So much for the environment.
It takes a mighty large fleet of family saloons to do the damage of one jumbo.
A tax on aviation fuel might mean fewer passengers. Good. Those businessmen would be better off staying at home and using a telephone or e-mail or video conferencing anyway. We could probably double our business productivity if we put to better use all the time spent by all those middle-ranking executives in airport lounges and business-class seats. We might even use some of the money raised to improve public transport on the ground.
Ah, but we must protect the airline industry. Why? Industries exist to do us good. We don’t exist to do them good. If anything was symbolic of our absurd approach to air travel, it was the return to service of Concorde. The media coverage was hysterical.
Yet Concorde is a monster. Beautiful, yes, but still a monster that allows a few clapped-out pop stars and overpaid businessmen to save a couple of hours at great cost to the environment. Our cost.
By all means let us admire its beauty. So let’s plonk it on the spare plinth in Trafalgar Square where it can do no more damage. And let’s park some of our outdated attitudes to the airline industry alongside
it.
