Finding a flight is also a frustrating experience for users right now. Airlines are selling tickets for destinations, which if you look at historical data, they haven't flown to for 6 months. If you buy a ticket, your flight gets cancelled and you end up spending the next weeks jumping hoops and waiting for your money to be refunded (and assuming you bought it in a jurisdiction that mandates refunds).
Advice: if the airline isn't flying to this destination this week, if you can't see the flight on the airport's online arrival boards or on flight tracking websites, don't buy the ticket, the flight is likely fictitious.
I've been going through this these past two weeks in Europe. I just need to do two short flights, one of them between two major cities. So far, it has cost me hundreds of dollars - ie, I've lost that much - and two dozen hours of lost time in phone calls, emails, and non-functioning websites and apps (of major airlines and subsidiaries). I currently have several hundred dollars in many cancelled flights apparently being refunded to me.
Almost every flight time gets either changed or the flight gets cancelled, and Airbnbs get cancelled left and right as well. All of this post-confirmation. Secondary effects of these cancellations are having to rearrange schedules of connecting flights or accomodations, and thereby losing money. It's been a (first-world problem) nightmare.
As of now, my first flight looks like it might actually happen, and I've given up on pre-purchasing my second flight, choosing instead to attempt to buy the connecting flight from the airport.
My wife was recently traveling in Europe, and wanted to return early. She asked me to handle calling the airline to reschedule the return flight. It was exactly as you describe.
Luckily I was talking to a very helpful airline employee, and (I guess?) because it was the airline trying to book the tickets (with themselves and other airlines for other legs of the trip), I wasn't charged for each booked-but-ultimately-fictitious flight.
But even the airline employee seemed mystified. What would happen is she'd find and reserve the flights in her system, read me the whole itinerary, then get to the last step and say, "oh that's weird, <other airline> isn't accepting adding you to this flight." This happened three times, with different flights / different partner airlines.
In the end the only thing which worked was to book an identical itinerary, same day of the week and times, just one week early - implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week.
>In the end the only thing which worked was to book an identical itinerary, same day of the week and times, just one week early
My own booking problem and later "hack" is as follows: I think one mistake I made was to book my connecting flight (wiht another airline) within a few hours of my arrival time. In this kind of scenario, if airline A or B changes the flight time or cancels, then it messes up my flight with the other airline. Which means, in Covid times, it seems best to stay a day or two in the layover city rather than try to make everything line up before any flights have taken place.
>implying that the only "real" flight out only runs once a week
To try to figure out real flight likelihood, I had to piece together ever-changing gov't regulations about who can fly where, in regards to quarantines, with how the airlines might be responding to that news in their flight scheduling. And on top of that, pretend to book flights to figure out how full they are, then continuing to do this every other day even after my flight is booked, to get a gauge on how likely cancellation is.
This just happened to my family. We booked a non-stop flight on Alaska Airlines from Southern California to Maui only to have it canceled a couple weeks later. They rebooked us from so cal -> Seattle -> Oahu -> Maui, but with young kids this just isn't a realistic option for us. If they wouldn't have offered the flight in the first place we could have looked for a different airline or even a different destination. Now we are doing all that last minute. It is frustrating that they rebooked our flight to save them money at the cost of our time, without reducing our fare at all. It felt very one sided and like a bait-and-switch. We also asked if we could change our dates to a non-stop flight in November or later, but they said we would need to pay the fare difference. Super frustrating, but it seems like airlines just kinda get to do whatever they want.
I do think they are intentionally booking flights that have no to low chances of flying. Currently there is no downside for them – either the flights eventually book enough people to make enough money for the airline to run the flight or they simply cancel them and put you on a much worse itinerary.
Sure, but they should be upfront with that when booking. Fwiw the plane seemed fairly full when picking seats, especially when taking into account the blocked out the middle seats.
I don't think those seat pickers cannot be trusted for this information. I had one American Airlines flight that showed so full that I had to pay for seats so that my wife and I could sit together. When we got on the plane, it was clearly under capacity and there were plenty of seats together. I complained to the flight attendant a bit just to vent, and later I saw a refund for the up charge. I assume it was due to my complaint, but who knows maybe they have some sort of process that automatically refunds them on under capacity trips.
I used to catch a Delta flight back and forth from sjc to sea, that was consistently about half full.
I would always wait until everyone boarded, then move up to comfort plus or whatever it was called. On my last flight the attendant told me to move back since it wasn't fair for the suckers, no offense, that paid for it.
I offered to pay a nominal amount for the seat. The attendant pulled up the little register stick and said it would be $75. I said no thanks and moved back to my empty row about 3 rows back.
This resembles me "tactics" of many book selling sites. They keep in their catalog books which they don't have on stock just to get traffic. User arrives and see that a given book is not available. Really annoying.
> Well, at least you learn that before paying for the book, not after
Not always, and not just with books either. I've had this happen more times than I care for. "X items in stock". Then you order. "The delivery will be in 3 weeks". This has happened to me at book sellers (Amazon!), Bol.com, Hornbach and even at Centralpoint. Drop shippers suffer more from this than companies that really do carry their own stock.
Last year we wanted to buy a new sofa from a local dealer of Black Red White. We chose a model we liked, found it in stock, placed an order, paid for it, and awaited delivery.
Two weeks later - past the expected delivery - no sofa, no indication when it'll arrive. It took my wife one week of e-mailing and phonecalling back and forth between BRW and their local seller until we finally learned that the sofa was not actually in stock, the model is out of production, so it will be custom-manufactured for us and should arrive in few months.
Fortunately, we were able to cancel the order and get our money back. We went to a bed store 10 minutes walk from our home and bought a sofa that we could physically see and touch.
Advice: Use a good travel agent. In the UK I've used Trailfinders for many years for non-standard long-haul involving changes. They've dug me out of problems when I;ve had them. Like time when my wife didn't pack my passport on a long-haul to Australia. I went back to get my passport, but would miss the first leg. The airlines autmatically cancel all other legs.
The travel agent had sorted it all out while I was on the tube home, I ended up being able to catch up with the family in Singapore a day later after a flight via Düsseldorf. They earned their money that day.
>They don't have your best interests at heart by a long shot.
Huge shops like flight centre certainly don't, you're nobody to them. Their business primarily consists of selling terrible package holidays to clueless people. This is not what GP meant with "a good travel agent".
The incentives are completely different for smaller agencies offering a personalized service.
The smaller and "good" agencies generally focus on customer service, while the bigger ones focus on customer acquisition through brand name and probably do not care about customer retention.
It used to be that airlines (and hotels and rental car agencies) paid enough in commissions that travel agencies made good money booking flights.
Southwest Airlines, for example, has never paid commissions.
As sites like Expedia grew, many (all?) other airlines and hotels have reduced and reduced their commissions.
For some people, there's still value in saying "I want to take a trip to x" and let the travel agent work out the details. But the travel agencies now charge a fee to the customer because they get comparatively little from the businesses.
I don't follow this. Customer service is useful for customer retention in small firms, but customer service is also useful for building a brand in large firms.
The motivation for both is the same: selling as many vacation packages as possible.
Brands have inertia. Once your brand is big enough, you can get away with a shitty customer service and generally screwing customers over. If you aren't a total disaster of a company, then the worst that happens is that some of your customers book with another big brand the next year... but then customers who got screwed by that other brand will try their luck with you.
I'm really guessing with major travel agencies it works the same way as it seems to work with mobile operators in my country: you have three major networks to choose from, every one tries to screw you over as much as possible, but since everyone needs a smartphone, people just bounce around between the three in anger (or try to arbitrage deals). Viewed at scale, it's just an equilibrium.
I swear by flightfox. I have had extraordinary service with them. Worth every cent. I can't tell you how amazing they have been for me and my family the last months.
I'm not kidding. They got all my international flights refunded and booked flights that I thought were impossible. Paid for itself with each booking that needed expert attention.
Travel agents can't do much when the airlines are - at best - confused by what's happening. And at worst they're acting in bad faith to continue receiving income for flights which might exist but probably won't - either because of sudden restrictions, or because the flight will be >80% empty and an unviable loss.
So they'll take the money to shore up revenue and cash flow, and then customers can fight their way through their systems to get it back when the flight is cancelled. All manner of hilarity ensues. (Unless you're one of those waiting - now literally numbering millions in Europe - then it's not funny at all.)
Personally I'm not going to trust any airline with a flight booking until there's something resembling a reliable service again.
If you’ve got a high end credit card (something that charges $500 or more a year for the annual fee), it probably comes with a travel concierge service. Your wait time on the phone is going to be much shorter, and the credit card company is a large enough aggregate customer that they will have leverage you don’t.
A local school had a trip to Sacramento booked through a travel agent. The Travel Agent went bankrupt and the Airline refunded the travel agent and did not refund the ticket to the parents.
So, good being the operative word here as Travel Agents are prone to going bankrupt right now.
On the other hand (just as anecdotal), I've flown a couple dozen times in my life (~50) and have never had any problems myself (luck plays a big role in this I reckon). Would I have used a travel agency, I'd probably be a few thousand euros lighter.
If you know what you're doing, a travel agency is going to suck. Flying 100+ times a year, I hate when I have to deal with an agency, because it makes being 'agile' in the face of events much, much more difficult.
If you DONT know or rarely travel, it probably IS worth effort. It's can be tricky to deal with things and know what you can/can't do in each situation.
Anyone flying that much does so in a very different world. Even without flashing cards or identifying yourself, airline employees and computer systems know you are valued customer, resulting in a very different user experience. This can be as extreme as you rarely ever being bumped off of flights, or as subtle as help lines pushing your cell number to the top of a wait queue. Like it or not, if you fly 100+ times a year you will get special treatment.
You're right, I guess all of the heavy travelers I know are just stumbling around in the dark and don't know what's going on.
I've used a bunch of them for corporate travel, and at no point has it been a breeze.
Knowing what fares are available on specific flights, seat assignments, etc. lets me get exactly the experience I want, without 'hoping they got me the seats I like' or anything.
For hotel bookings I don't see what advantage they have over either the basic hotel websites or calling my status hotline for assistance in tricky situations.
In all cases the travel agency removes my agency to work directly with the airlines or the hotel to fix issues.
>You're right, I guess all of the heavy travelers I know are just stumbling around in the dark and don't know what's going on.
If they're corporate travelers spending somebody else's money this is usually the case.
>I've used a bunch of them for corporate travel, and at no point has it been a breeze. Knowing what fares are available on specific flights, seat assignments, etc. lets me get exactly the experience I want, without 'hoping they got me the seats I like' or anything.
It sounds like you've just worked with the big shops that offer a terrible service.
>For hotel bookings I don't see what advantage they have over either the basic hotel websites or calling my status hotline for assistance in tricky situations.
Because of programs like FSPP, STARS and MO fan club you're essentially always going to get better value by booking through a travel agency the hotel has a relationship with.
>In all cases the travel agency removes my agency to work directly with the airlines or the hotel to fix issues.
In all cases the travel agency is in a far stronger negotiating position to fix any issues. If the hotel screws up something I'd much rather have my travel agent yell at them and arrange compensation for me than spend time dealing with it myself, the outcome will always be better this way because his business is worth much more to the hotel than mine.
>> the travel agency is in a far stronger negotiating position to fix any issues.
Maybe, but that assumes that the travel agent is actually working for you. What kickbacks does the agency get from the airline/hotel? That is the longer term relationship, far longer than any one-time customer-agent relationship. The agency would probably rather drop or mistreat a customer than damage their relationship with the airline/hotel.
The agent doesn't get kickbacks from the airline or the hotel. The agent gets a kickback from the distribution system, which itself charges a fee to the airline. Airlines don't want agencies, they tolerate them because they still bring the vast majority of traffic (except for some lowcosts, e.g. SWA, Ryanair)
AFAIK if they're in a partner program like FSPP the kickback will come directly from the chain, and these are exactly the bookings where travel agents can offer the most value.
We'll just have to continue living in different worlds. That's never been my experience, ever.
If they're not a big shop, they're going to have even less leverage with the vendors than I do as the valued customer. If they are a big shop with leverage, they're not going to give a shit about me.
And are you confusing 'better experience' or 'save money'? Sure, I'll definitely grant you that it might be cheaper booking through an agent, especially if you buy a package/etc.
That's not, in my experience, ever a better experience. The goal is to not suffer, not safe a few hundred bucks.
Most of my holidays are in the mid 5 figures range, shorter work trips tend to average around 2k/night. I'm not looking for cheap deals, but for a better experience. I don't buy packages, I mostly design my own itineraries.
I work with a boutique agency with around 10 staff, their yearly volumes with the chains I frequent are in the tens of millions. There are lots of agencies like this, you only need a couple of billionaire clients making regular 500k bookings to have a plenty of leverage.
I always thought travel agents were bullshit until I found out about the perks offered trough the Four Seasons preferred partner program and figured I'd give it a shot for a single booking. After check-in the agent called me to make sure everything went smoothly, I pointed out a tiny issue regarding the check-in progress that I would've immediately forgotten about if not for the fabulous service recovery arranged by the agent. After that this agency has had all of my business.
I remember when I was a teenager that I was all into opening everything to digital self-service. I preferred doing business with companies that allowed me to do everything via their website, so that I could do things on my own and without unnecessary human contact. I thought this is how the world is supposed to work.
Fast forward one and a half decade, today I, frankly, have more disposable income than free time. I'm tired of self-service bullshit (and companies always love to complicate things to create upselling opportunities). I avoid doing things through websites or apps. E-mails are better, because once the other side replies, it means a human has acknowledged my request so I get to ensure they understand it right, and if they screw up, they can't blame it on "the system". Phone calls are the best, because dealing with a human on the line is much faster than dealing with confusing websites and broken apps.
And now I finally understand why travel agencies, all-inclusive holidays, concierges, secretaries, etc. all exist. It's for people who are at the stage in their careers where they have enough disposable income to use it to save time and frustration. Relying on digital self-service isn't a sign that you're an awesome self-reliant tech-whizz (like I thought in my teenage years). It's a sign you're not rich enough to pay someone else to deal with it.
In general, you need agents to navigate complex systems with which you have little familiarity.
Given the 21st century air travel features navigating complex automated systems designed to gaslight you into giving them interest-free loans, it seems like an agent is exactly what is called for.
I expect the value of SME-assistance in a number of areas is going to increase, not shrink.
The refund process is hellish, even at the best of times.
I was caught in a chain of delayed flights on 12th September 2018. Once I made it home my wife persuaded me to file a compensation claim, as we're entitled to do.
Two years later I've still not received a penny. It's not a lot of money, but I'm gonna keep chasing it until they pay up just as a matter of stubbornness now.
(Mostly I'd have been "meh, flights get delayed sometimes". But it was a rough series of flights with a two year old child and that made everything much more difficult for us.)
Most airports have temporarily suspended their slot usage rules. At the beginning of the pandemic some airlines flew empty flights on regular routes just to keep their slots but that hasn't happened much for several months now.
My personal pet theory is contractual obligations and/or high-value customer placation. There are certain high-frequency business travelers that need(ed) to travel on whatever date and time they pleased, and just cutting one's flight network entirely meant losing them as a customer and potentially paying some fines. However, actually running that many flights is extremely uneconomical. So instead they basically cancel whatever flights don't have one of these particular business travelers on it to try and move demand around.
Of course, those high-value fliers have reduced their use of air travel in the same way everyone else has, so a lot of flights are basically "virtual" and will never actually fly unless they meet some particular threshold of value to the airline. If that's the actual case, then what airlines should be looking into is bringing back standby ticketing.
They're probably operating on hope. Maybe something happens in 2 weeks like a company announcing they've been making billions of doses of fool-proof vaccine. Or more likely, governments relaxing restrictions because they can't handle the economic pain anymore. Or the flights are actually legally possible, but if only 5 people have booked the route, they don't want to burn all that fuel and pay all the wages and fees to earn the 5 ticket prices, so they'll wait to see if a profitable amount of passengers show up (makes me think of buses in Asia that wait until they're full before setting off...).
Also if you've paid them and they cancel, guess who can use your money to try and survive for a few weeks more. Or even longer since they can give you a voucher.
> if you can't see the flight on the airport's online arrival boards or on flight tracking websites, don't buy the ticket, the flight is likely fictitious.
Afaik the flight gets "confirmed" if enough people buy the tickets. At least that's how I've seen it happen in germany.
The alternative is that they offer the regular schedules, let's say 3 flights per day, let people book, each flight end up being 2/3rd empty. Then they notify the passengers the schedule changed, but in fact they only keep one flight and redirect all passengers to the same plane.
I would be OK with them only advertising one flight or less, I expect that in the current climate there will be reduced flights. I have issues with them deliberately selling tickets on flights that they know will never happen. I think that approach is pretty much a scam.
Just got back from a round trip (intra-eu). My experience was surprisingly pleasant.
Flights are mostly empty (<20% on mine), which makes for good onboard social distancing. It also means there is no point booking in advance. The airline also offered free date changes on all tickets, which also works well considering availability.
The number of flights is certainly down, and I'd suggest avoiding routes that (as the OP mentions) are not actually operating. Have a plan B to avoid getting stranded.
I don't know how this isn't illegal. We were going to book flights for my in-laws to go back to China...some tickets are like $5000. Some were $1000. Upon investigation, the $1000 hasn't flown for weeks, or that airline is not event on the approved list. China has limited who can fly there, and how often.
> if you can't see the flight on the airport's online arrival boards or on flight tracking websites,
Seconded. I learnt this lesson the hard way. Fortunately the interaction with the airline (KLM) was surprisingly pleasant and I was rebooked on an alternate flight from their partner airline (Air France). I monitored that new flight’s schedule like a hawk. Only when I boarded the final leg of the journey was I sure of reaching the destination.
With kids in tow and all the paperwork it’s extremely painful fly now a days. I guess this just about rules out all the tourist travelers for next one year at least. And with business travelers getting used to Zoom I really don’t know how will airlines recover to pre-COVID levels, if at all.
> If you buy a ticket, your flight gets cancelled and you end up spending the next weeks jumping hoops and waiting for your money to be refunded
Whoa, thanks for your comment. I thought I was going crazy. Booked two different flights, one ticket was cancelled after 5 days, one just after 2h. Both without any explanation. I was wondered whether my credit card is blacklisted.
And true, now I'm not hoping to get my money back for weeks, maybe even months.
Do you have a link to where I can find that historical data that you are talking about? Genuinely curious, because I've been facing the same problem you have.
Haha weeks — Delta told me two weeks ago they _just_ finished processing refunds for June. Our refund will probably not be refunded for another 6 months, minimum, according to their customer service people.
"In 2017, when United Airlines reduced the weight of its paper in its inflight magazine, it saved nearly 770,000 litres of fuel a year – or $290,000 in costs."
This hit home.
770000 litres of jet kerosene translate to 2100 tons of CO_2 emissions[0]. That's the emissions of more than 200 average Germans or 50% of the emissions of over 400 people.
Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all, so maybe even more people would be required for an equivalent reduction in emissions.
Now: if someone at an airline thinks that the inflight magazine feels cheap now and that it should be printed on better paper again, it would wipe out any emission savings that hundreds of people could ever hope to achieve personally. Makes one feels a bit helpless, doesn't it?
Edit: the point I wanted to make is that a willy-nilly decision of someone with sufficient influence can have way more effect that intentional decisions of average people could ever have.
That's getting suspiciously close to a passage from the Hitchhikers guide where you are instructed to get a receipt every time you use the lavatory otherwise you might end up with some quick surgery before departure.
If one cares about climate change, it would be an odd strategy to focus on 0.1% fuel efficiency increases while 10% of flights can somewhat easily be replaced by video calls.
right about the same time we get the paperless office will we see a transition to video conferencing taking over in face. change is hard
hell at work that is one thing they want to get back in office for is face to face. they have mandated cameras for all managers working remote and looking to do the same for other workers. Still there are teams that are doing one day face to face meetings.
I don’t think that is helpful though. Some people focus on this, others focus on that, and we can all both cut down our journeys while also packing lighter when we do travel. We’re not going to solve this by ‘focusing on’ any one thing. I’m really tired of criticisms of perfectly good work that amount to ‘but this other thing is more important’. There’s almost always something else more important. So what?
No, if one cared one could spend the couple dollars to buy carbon credits to offset your flight. That would do a lot more than a shaving a fraction of a percent of fuel. I notice some airlines have a checkbox for this at checkout, it makes it quite easy to do. I wonder if it really offsets the carbon from the flight though, it seems so cheap. Like any one of the dozen taxes you pay for the flight is more than that. If it's the case one could mandate a tax to cover it and all flights in the country could be carbon neutral instantly and nobody would notice the difference.
Honestly - the flight I took the most pre-covid was a regional commuter between a midwest city and Washington DC. It's like a 2.5 hour flight, at most.
Why do you need a toilet for that? I understand there are disabilities that may call for it. But in the 10-15 years I made that flight regularly, I never saw someone use the toilet an extreme amount. It was more for convenience. I have to assume that those short-haul flights could save a ton of fuel by eliminating toilets.
But I also have a young(ish) bladder and young(ish) digestive system. So maybe I'm just too self-centered.
Possibility of plane unable to take off at the scheduled time but holding on the runway to make the next available slot.
The problem with cutting some things out is that, even though it might not be utilized 95% of the time, that 5% when you need it, you really need it.
Similar to the backup generator for your data center and justifying it along with the maintenance and tests that go along with it to your boss.
My worry with the direction that engineering is moving, lean, is that we are reducing our safeties below a good level. I see the philosophy moving to other areas, such as finance, creating a race to the bottoms where everyone is leveraged as much as possible. Then when a crisis hits, everyone is unable to survive and we have to turn to government bailouts.
Lean philosophy has recently been targeting healthcare, as a way to reduce cost and reduce adverse outcome while improving quality. While I do think this is important, looking at what is going on in the middle of a pandemic. Is a contributing factor of hospitals running out of masks and ventilators due to lean inventory management practices?
I read a lot a about food wast and how we over produce, it seems logical that there will be a push for lean practices there as well. I could see it being made as a strategy to reduce the amount of CO2 as well as farm land. But conversely, with climate change and the risk of crop failure, is that a good idea?
> I am completely, and 100% over lean philosophy/training/gurus.
100% with you here. Especially the ones preaching 'optimizing' your personal life by getting rid of any capacity beyond what you use in your daily life. Once you peel back the glossy cover they almost always, in real terms, translate to "save money by mooching off your friends' equipment and work space".
Sorry if my tone was a little strong, that was not my intention at all. I saw where you said you were thinking from a limited scope and decided to use it as a thought exercise :) Then I went off on a tangent about cost cutting XD
I get semi-panic attacks if I know I can’t have access to a toilet if I really want to, and not in 2 hours’ time, but in 5 or 10 minutes’ time. That’s why I avoided taking inter-city buses before I purchased my car (which happened 6 years ago), and instead opted for trains (which were slower but had working toilets).
In other words asking grown-up people to just “keep it in” doesn’t work, just ask Tottenham player Eric Dier for the latest example (am on mobile, too lazy to link, but a quick web search should give you the whole story).
You need to bear in mind that it's common practice for one aircraft to fly several different routes, even in the same day. So it might do a short 2.5 hour flight in the morning, then do a longer 5 hour flight after. Also I'm not sure with lo-cost carriers that the crew will get a chance to disembark. The plane will be turned around as quickly as possible.
Comsider the situation if they removed the bathrooms. What’s the plan when inevitably somebody didn’t plan ahead or gets sick? A very unpleasant ride / the whole cabin watching their fellow flyer urinate (or worse) in the aisle? Seems like a complete nonstarter.
This raises a question, shouldn't a ticket price component has some relationship with your weight. Discounts/extra prices depending on your how much away you are from design assumptions.
I would be okay with this only if they also gave me appropriate seating for my height. Being tall has had some benefits, but I'm constantly annoyed by the consequences.
This would be great but how on earth would we get people to comply? We can't even get people to wear masks in stores right now without throwing a tantrum. People would like lie like crazy regarding their weight. Heck, my driver license is 25lbs lower than I currently am.
I guess you could alleviate the embarrassment factor by making it a total passenger + baggage max so people could weigh themselves AND their carryons at home before they arrive to confirm and offset anything.
On tiny planes, like the ones that go between islands in the Pacific, they weigh everyone (with hand baggage) when checking in. This is in order to load the plane evenly.
Interesting ... weighting yourself could be optional. And if you are below some mark/average, you'd receive a discount voucher for future flight.
As a result, this airliner would be attracting lighter/leaner customers, which would save fuel costs.
I think it should be. It is an industry where the weight of the goods is very closely tied to the cost, which isn’t really the case for car or train travel (obviously weight is a factor but 30 lbs plus or minus isn’t changing the cost to get you there by 10-20%). They already weigh your bags and charge you based on that (usually $30 for anything under 50 lbs and something like $70 for over 5o lbs).
I think the backlash to them charging extra if you and your total bags comes in “overweight” would be too high to work. Even if people weren’t offended, you wouldn’t really be able to have a good idea how much extra you’d be hit with until you were at the gate. But if they did some sort of discount refund or maybe a voucher for future flights, that might work. Start weighing the checked bags and noting the exact weight (instead of just over-under 50 lbs) and then stepping on a scale with your carryon luggage (with no outward display) and totaling them. If you are under the average, you get a voucher credited to your account on a sliding scale by how much you are under. If you are over the average or you choose not to be weighed, nothing changes and you have only paid the full fare like normal.
This would obviously be socially unacceptable, but airlines do already charge for weight in other ways – baggage weight, large item surcharges, hand luggage charges, etc.
If taxes on petrol are not charged for airlines, those businesses will for sure use their cheap petrol in their advantage. The nice-thick-paper mags must have helped them make quite a bit of money on "in flight purchases".
If we are serious about cutting CO2(-equivalent) emissions, we must tax all emittors equally. Airlines should not be able to escape it, or we will keep seeing this kind of oddities in that high pollution industry.
I don't mean to nit-pick, but 'petrol' and 'gasoline' are not generic terms for fuel. Some (piston-engined) propeller airplanes use petrol/gasoline, and are usually exempted from certain local taxes (as are marine users and farm users). Airliners are usually powered by turbine engines (often 'jets'), fueled by kerosene (or one of the JP-series fuels) which fall under their own tax regimes.
*addendum: apparently Canada has implemented or is planning to implement a carbon tax on aviation fuel.
> Cutting one's emissions by half is most likely not easy at all
It is very easy if you travel by plane several times per year, even on short distances, and you just stop to do that. In fact, it is probably the most effective thing you can do to reduce your own lifetime carbon footprint. A single two-hour flight produces around 400 kilograms of CO2 per person. This is equivalent to several months of heating in a cold country.
And don't start me harping about "offsetting" carbon emissions. Carbon has been captured in the course of hundreds of millions of years. There is nothing humans can do which can store it again for the same time. Almost all carbon from a tree is released when the tree dies.
In fact, it is even worse for coal. The coal deposits which we still exploit today, against all better knowledge, have mostly been formed during the carboniferous geological period. In this period, there were NO bacteria and fungi which could decompose lignin, the main structural component of wood. In other words, the wood from trees could not decay, which was the base for the coal deposits from the carboniferous period, which still form most of the coal today. The consequence of this is that burning coal is irreversible even in the course of tens of thousands of years, because the conditions under which this coal has been formed - an absence of fungi that can decompose lignin - simply do not exist any more. We are not only doing massive damage to the next generations of human children, but we are profoundly and irreversibly changing the conditions for life on Earth.
You're mostly wrong about the coalification process as it relates to the carboniferous. There's many different types of coal, but the one you seem to be thinking of is hard coal (anthracite). The others are lignite and bituminous coal.
It's indeed the case that the comparative lack of rotting during carboniferous contributed to the available biomass to turn into coal, but that sort of coal doesn't form without heat and compression. It's got as much to do with the earth being more geologically active at the time, and more low-lying wetlands.
But coal is forming today from peat -> lignite -> bituminous coal -> anthracite (then eventually graphite). E.g. Germany's electricity generation was ~30% lignite burning in 2015[1], and those deposits formed mostly during the tertiary period.
So you're five to six orders of magnitude off if you think coal hasn't been forming since the carboniferous.
None of which is to say that these deposits are renewable in any practical sense. We can imagine digging them all up and burning them in the next 500 years, and then having to wait around the time since the T-Rex walked the earth for meaningful regeneration.
Exactly, it might not happen naturally at the same scale anymore, but getting carbon back into the ground is definitely possible. The main issue is cost/effort.
Why would a pound of carbon from air travel be worse than a pound of carbon from something else? If it were taxed differently, wouldn't that provide an incentive to produce more CO2, against market forces?
I mean taxes on all carbon emissions should be raised (if airlines already pay them, otherwise airlines should pay them - also "taxes" can be replaced with a cap-and-trade scheme).
I would really like to have fine-grained information on the distribution of emissions in a society. Nobody in my circles is flying more than at most once per year but I know someone who's flying bi-weekly over transatlantic distances (to either the US or to Asia). They certainly contribute a good deal to the average emissions that we do not.
It makes me feel like just putting the right economic incentives in place, will rapidly lead to savings no one imagined possible before.
As you point out, motivating individuals to reduce their carbon footprint is incredibly inefficient, as it is very difficult for individuals to make much difference if the goods and services they consume are not also optimized to become more carbon efficient.
But if 770000 liters of kerosene can be saved by making the inflight magazine lighter, can you imagine what other low hanging fruit are out there, if incentivized by the right kind of carbon taxes and other incentives? Businesses can very rapidly adapt and make changes with outsize impact like this, far more than individuals can.
Well, then imagine how much CO2 emission it saves if all of us cancel our traveling plans, especially those nice twice-a-year overseas family vacations. Oh wait, that's one of the privileges that anyone dares to take away, right?
I've always wished they'd remove the unnecessary advertising for luxury goods I'll never buy since I'm flying in cattle class, this further drives home that sentiment.
I suspect the only reason they keep them is due to the advertising revenue they gain by printing them in the first place.
Digital entertainment systems built into the screens or served over WiFi are slowly replacing them, but I doubt there's a weight reduction with the screen based solutions.
And it is a rather good point. Corporations should bear the burden of changing "consumption" habits, much more than individuals, as any corporate action scales much more than individual actions.
Papper magazine?! Why on earth they carry onboard a little warehouse of cosmetics, perfumes, plastic merchandise, and other overpriced tat no one buys? Yet it's the passenger luggage which they've (ie. airlines in general) always targeted with their ridiculous corporate cost-cutting policies.
One way to understand these trends, Aboulafia told me, is through the industry’s most beloved metric: the seat mile. If a plane with 300 available seats flies 1,000 miles, that flight clocks up 300,000 seat miles. Airlines are constantly comparing revenue per available seat mile, or Rasm, with cost per available seat mile, or Casm. Aboulafia, pronouncing these terms as “razzum” and “cazzum”, said: “As long as razzum is a nose above cazzum, you’re happy.”
If you're an Italian speaker, this can be very funny and ironic.
"Ad cazzum" is a sort of fake latinism, to say (in a sort of fake-courtly language) that something has been done/said/thought in a totally random way with no planning at all.
Doing something "ad cazzum" means, generally, that you've just done it without even the slightest hint of thinking before acting.
You should also add that “cazzo” is Italian for “dick” and “alla cazzo di cane” is vulgar for something done in a hurry, bumbling along as you go... (and if you close your eyes for a moment and imagine a dog happily strolling along you get the picture)
Also note that English speakers would pronounce the double-zed in "razzum" and "cazzum" as "z", whereas in Italian it's pronounced more as "ts" (i.e. "catso", not "cazo"). Additionally, the "u" in "cazzum" should be silent in an Englsh accent, but clearly spoken in Italian: "caz'm" as opposed to "cah-zoom".
(Speaking as a non-native speaker of both languages and having spent a lot more time in an English-speaking country than in Italy).
You might be underestimating how weird English orthography is.
If you know some Italian, then you'll know that words are pronounced the way they're spelled. If what you know is English, there's no reason to think the zz in pizza and the zz in cazzum are pronounced the same way.
But I'm also a low-grade language nerd. It drives me nuts when I see Latin-to-English loan words with inappropriate declinations, or fancy-sounding technical/medical terms formed by combining Latin and Greek word fragments [0]. So maybe my attention to correct pronunciation is atypical.
[0] I'm not claiming that I'm actually correct in all these cases; just that I go nuts at what I perceive to be bad treatment of loan words.
I don't know, if you tell native English speakers that "cazzo" is Italian, I assume they know it's pronounced catso. Of course if they find cazzo in the wild without context it'll be like the zz in "buzzard".
But then again, some people may think pizza is American and not make the link.
Like samatman says- knowning how to pronounce the zz in "pizza" doesn't predict one's ability to know how to pronounce it in another word.
I'm still taken by surprise by how English words I've read often but haven't heard spoken are actually spoken by native English speakers. My classic example is the word "nonchalant", which I always assumed would be pronounced in what is to me an English accent, as "non-CHAH-lahnt" but is actually pronounced in a French accent as "non-chah-LAWn".
As a native english speaker this even happens to me. I read the word "awry" as "aww-ree", and was very surprised when I discovered it was pronounced "a-rye". The best bit is that I was actually already familiar with the word awry, I just hadn't connected that the word I was reading was the same word as the word I was hearing.
Same here. When young I knew the spoken and written forms of several words without realizing they were the same. Chaos and Hyperbole come to mind (think last night's debate). You find out when you use the words-as-written (cha-ose, hyper-bowl) in conversation.
You have to remember that French borrowings have a special place in English. The timeline of Middle English is roughly defined by the Norman conquest at the start, and the replacement of French as the literary standard at the end. So it's not uncommon for French words to be spelled and pronounced somewhat accurately. (Now their meaning being recognizable is obviously a completely different question...)
GDSs, for those not aware, offer airlines anything from booking/pricing/interoperation services to full IT outsourcing.
These companies basically take a small fee out of every operation done by either Online Travel Agencies (OTA) or the airline itself.
Even before the pandemic airlines were already pissed at these monsters (Travelport and Amadeus being the biggest contenders) that arguably they created, but now with the razor thin margins of airline travel, GDSs are either gonna take a big cut on their already reduced revenue, or the boot.
For Amadeus, virtually all contractors (at least 1000 in one site, multiple thousands worldwide) have been dismissed overnight, and most hired staff are working reduced hours. I can only assume it's been the same for Travelport.
I never even expected Amadeus to have that many employees at one single site. Well, if the GDS providers start failing then there's going to be an interesting mess to get out of.
> Amadeus is today the biggest company in Sophia Antipolis with 5000 employees from and consultants from around the world, working in R&D, as well as marketing and support.
Roughly 30-40% of the workforce were consultants, so you can make the numbers. It's the wrong time if you wanted to look for a job in the area, estimates show there are about 1500 engineers without a mission or job, aggregated from all companies in Sophia.
The fact that Air France has a site there too helped drive up the numbers, a senior manager I know is working 1 day per week till the end of the year, so you can imagine what happened below him.
Observation: Often articles about the airline industry and new aviation tech manage to completely miss the giant elephant in the room - which is the incompatibility of this industry in its current form with a world in a climate crisis. This article is a noteworthy exception that it even talks about it.
I'd say 2% is a whole lot for a single industry, but there's a few more things that make this concerning.
It's an industry that has been growing a lot. It is an industry that is very unevenly used by the world population (many people don't fly at all). And it's an industry that barely has any idea how to fix its emission problem. (H2 will likely only work in short range and is still decades away, synfuels is extremely inefficient.)
We should really get started developing alternatives. Cement is a tough one, probably the toughest industry sector at all. For steel the swedish companies SSAB+LKAB have a very ambitious plan using hydrogen. I hope they succeed doing that.
That said and as othes have noted: Aviation is 2% of CO2, but a much larger share of overall emissions. I was surprised to recently learn that this is scientifically underresearched (particularly effects on cloud formation) and it may be everything between 4 and 7%.
It's part of a long line of perception management that shifts the burden of climate change off of the industries that are responsible for the problem (Oil and Gas, agriculture) and away from governmental solutions (carbon tax high enough to fund carbon neutrality, green industry incentives) and onto the individual (recycling, veganism, staycations, biking). I am at a point where I find all climate change solutions that focus on voluntary individual behavior to be laughably dishonest. Tragedy of the commons has been well understood for centuries. International governmental cooperation and regulation is the ONLY chance we have at addressing this issue, full stop. The rest is magical thinking.
And yet, avoiding a single transatlantic flight is enough to reduce an individual's CO₂ emissions by about 1.5 tonnes, or 2/3s of the reduction from living car-free (~2 tonnes) and is generally the third most effective way to reduce individual CO₂ emissions (behind having one fewer child and living car free and ahead of buying green energy, buying a more efficient car, siwtching to an electirc car or no car at all and eating a plant-based diet, in that order).
wait until you see what happens to the standard of living if we don't!
All IPCC targets assume getting to 0 emissions relatively soon. If we can't take economic hits to get there, then we'll take a fantastically more wild economic hit once we miss those goals.
I suggest you spend some time researching a bit what happens with each degree C we get to. It's far worse then just rising sea-levels.
The cost of diking every susceptible mile of seashore has been calculated before and it is a rounding error in terms of global GNP. The Netherlands was doing it in the 12th century with 12th century technology, and I don't think there is any nation today with average living standards below 12th century europe.
>Our survey of the climate record from station data reveals many global TW exceedances of 31° and 33°C and two stations that have already reported multiple daily maximum TW values above 35°C. These conditions, nearing or beyond prolonged human physiological tolerance, have mostly occurred only for 1- to 2-hours’ duration (fig. S2).
[...]
>Steep and statistically significant upward trends in extreme TW frequency (exceedances of 27°, 29°, 31°, and 33°C) and magnitude are present across weather stations globally (Fig. 2). Each frequency trend represents more than a doubling of occurrences of the corresponding threshold between 1979 and 2017.
[...]
>The southern Persian Gulf shoreline and northern South Asia are home to millions of people, situating them on the front lines of exposure to TW extremes at the edge of and outside the range of natural variability in which our physiology evolved (36).
I feel like air conditioning millions (and soon, billions) of people will be more than a rounding error of GNP. Indeed, economic activity may be... slightly curtailed... in countries where going outside results in death.
there is a lot more land in the northern hemisphere than at the equator. People will move over the next hundred years. Populations will look much more different in 2100 just like they looked very different in 1900. Countries like Canada will become more than 90 km in vertical length. Countries like Russia and Norway and Finland and the United States will also become more habitable. There is a lot more land that will become accessible than land that will become too harsh.
People are moving because of climate right now and it's causing massive civil unrest. This is nothing compared to the scale that will happen when a sizeable portion of the earth is not inhabitable.
If we get to 6C, which is a very real possibility given the fairly large number of positive feedback and history of rapid climate events on the planet, human extinction is a potential outcome.
But I suspect that's really no evidence or argument that would convince you that things won't be pretty much fine, which is why I'm personally more convinced then ever that we will likely see that 6C.
I'm not saying that things are pretty much fine. Climate change is a real problem. It is a global problem. I can't think of a reason to believe that prevention is a strategy that will work. Adaption on the other hand is likely to be the better option.
What you say is entirely correct: in 2120 there will, proportionally, be more people living in northern latitudes.
It nimbly skips over what will happen to get them there. India is the second most populated country in the world. Pakistan is fifth. Between them, they need to move hundreds of millions of people before the end of the century.
Directly north of them are China and Russia. China and Russia both have very restrictive immigration policies, and are one-party authoritarian states.
Pakistan's average temperature is 60-70f. They are not under threat from heat rise predicted by the IPCC. A good part of India is also moderate in temperature. Like I said earlier, most people already don't live in areas that will become too harsh. The equator is sparsely populated relative to other latitudes.
It's not the sea-level rise itself that would be the most damaging economically long-term. It's the changing weather, and how it affects agriculture, water availability etc - and in some regions, the ability of humans to function there in general, for some parts of the year.
There is an incredible portion of the planet that is not habitable for most of the year. The majority of land on Earth is north of the equator, and very much of it is just flat out impossible to thrive in year round. Global warming will probably be a net benefit in this respect.
As far as agriculture is concerned, the IPCC says that rising temperatures will be good for farming (within a certain limit, 2-3c I believe). Carbon after all is an input to photosynthesis.
There's more to farming than temperature. A lot of people think that, as things get warmer, we'll simply move agriculture further to the north. But it's also a matter of soil fertility - many of the most fertile areas that we have today will be adversely affected, and the new ones that'll open up due to warming (e.g. in Canada and in Siberia) have very poor soils.
> And if we apply that logic to every industry, we end up driving people's standards of living back centuries.
That assumes that the only way to reduce CO2 is to halt the industry, and that is not true for most industries. The problem is that most industries have no cost associated with CO2 emissions. So they have no profit incentive to reduce those emissions. Simply adding in the full cost of operation, including CO2, would drive industry to innovate more efficient technology, reduce CO2 waste, and yes, some industries would be revealed as being too costly in CO2 production to be viable at the current levels of use.
There are many industrial processed that are horribly inefficient and wasteful, but the cost of that inefficiency is not paid by the company, so switching would only hurt profit margins. Any company competing would be at a massive price disadvantage. If the full cost fell on the company, consumers would quickly buy products and services that used efficient tech and reduced waste, because those would be the cheaper options.
Most industries are not CO2 producers because it is required to maintain that standard of living. I pay for my garbage to be collected and properly disposed of, but if I could just dump it in my neighbor’s yard for free, I could save money. Forcing me to pay for it myself keeps us all from having our yard filled with garbage.
We're talking about flying. You don't need to go back very far (less than 50 years) to get to a point where the majority of people in western countries never took a flight. We're absolutely not talking about resetting life to what it was like in the 1700s. We might possibly be talking about going back to what it was like in the 1980s, where flights where mostly for the very wealthy or something people did 4 or 5 times in their lifetime, but it's more likely it'd be nothing as dramatic as that.
Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. We have used fossil fuels to prop up the carrying capacity of humans on the planet quite a bit.
This is why it is really important to ask questions about what we really need, and if we're at all interested in human survival in the future, we need make serious decision to scale down the economy soon.
Of course I'm not very optimistic that this will happen.
I suspect the efficiency and productivity gains from information technology mean computers and software engineering actually reduce the effect of climate change by improving most industries more than they contribute to climate change directly, but I don't have any hard evidence for that.
I said if we applied that logic to every industry, we'd set standards of living back centuries. The vast vast majority of what humans produce and consume is not essential for living, but if we cut it all out there wouldn't be much to live for.
It is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population. Considering the distribution of benefits for very few and costs for all, it is an entirely predatory technology.
If the airline industry goes completely bust, I am sorry for the people who worked there, and all in to give them another meaningful job, but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
If you have been on a commercial flight in the past 3 years you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth. If you are just on hackernews you are very likely (50%+ chance) in the 5% of the richest people on Earth.
If you make $33,500 a year, you are among the richest 5% in the world. [0]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 10% in 2012 was about PPP$15,600 per capita household income, or PPP$62,000 for a family of four. [1]
The threshold for an individual to enter the global top 1% in 2012 is about PPP$50,000 per capita household income, or PPP$200,000 for a family of four. [1]
>It is 2% of mostly completely needless carbon emissions which are produced exclusively by the richest 1% of Earths population.
This is completely untrue. One of the biggest sources of airline travel is Chinese domestic tourism, far from the richest 1%.
>but at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole
How incredibly arrogant of you to think you speak for all of humanity. Clearly a huge number of humans value air travel, due to their extensive use of it, please explain to me how you know better than all of them about what's good for them?
Surely it's even more arrogant to assume that individual preferences and a market that doesn't price externalities will somehow avoid the existential threat of climate change. Or do you not "believe" in that?
> Some can't get other, e.g. countries living off tourism.
You mean countries like Greece which destroyed their local industries, and eco systems, in favor of tourism and can't go back ?
People have been warning about these things for decades. If you build your entire economy on a flimsy and unsustainable business model you'll lose at some point.
It doesn't really matter if it feeds millions or not, the unsustainability will make it crash sooner or later, the longer you let it go the harder it'll be.
> at the same time it would be a very good thing for humanity as a whole.
In some ways half of us dying would be good for humanity as a whole. Let's try to balance the humanity with the individual benefit a bit. Otherwise we'll get to absurd conclusions.
Worldwide it's not far from 1%, if you make more than ~30k a year you're already top 5%. Also, the flight is "cheap", the actual vacation is much more expensive than the ticket itself.
We need to get to 0% emissions, cutting all air-travel and getting 2% knocked off in a single move is pretty good.
Consider this view: I'm currently trying to reduce my monthly expenditures, especially subscription services I no longer use. A service that was 2% of my monthly expenditures would be a pretty good savings for cutting a single service.
Given that it provides mostly luxury services, it's quite easy to get rid of these 2%. Nobody is going to suffer from not being able to take the plane to go on a vacation.
So they drive, or ship instead, and both being worse? or are you asking people to sacrifice their quality of life (i.e., _not_ take a vacation)? Because you know that won't happen.
You don't have to take a flight or drive your own car to take a vacation. I've been spending all my holidays in Greece in the last 10 years or so and I've taken a flight there maybe one or twice (and once was to attend a funeral when time was pressing). Otherwise I travel by land and sea, train and boat, no cars or planes whatsoever. I live in the UK, so it's a two- or three-days journey if you do it head-over-heels but it can take a lot longer if done at a leisure (which I usually do). I spend time visiting towns and cities in France and Italy that are out of my way, and still do that without driving.
In any case, taking a holiday or going abroad doesn't mean taking a flight, or driving. And I really doubt that taking a boat trip produces more CO₂ per capita than taking a flight, given that many more people will typically board a ferry boat, than board an airliner going the same distance.
That sounds fabulous, but it's a bit incompatible with a 1 week holiday if you don't want to view sitting on a train as "a holiday".
The purpose of travelling for holiday is not always sightseeing. Sometimes (for me, most of the time) it's about what's at the destination and what you do when you get there. For example, a sporting event, a particular sporting or leisure activity etc.
Well, I don't spend my holidays on the train. Like I say I visit places on my way to my destination, which is usually the Greek island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea. So for example, the summer before the Covid winter I spent a couple of days at Bruges, then Lille and finally Bologna, before taking the ferry from Ancona to Greece.
On the other hand, I've also travelled by bus (no good trains) to go to a conference in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and I'd have also travelled my usual way to conferences in Athens and Rhodes this year, that got cancelled because of Covid. Like I say above, you can do this kind of thing at a leisurly pace, or you can do it fast.
But I think the real problem is that travelling like that limits your range. I was offered an exchange position in China but travelling there by land would have taken me a week or so, so I declined.
But I can accept that my options are curtailed this way. Air travel has spoiled us in that we take it for granted that we can travel to the other end of the world in a few hours any time we like (if we can afford it), but this luxury has cost us greatly in terms of environmental damage. So, personally, I don't accept that going at a sporting event or leisure activity trumps the need to reduce emissions from air travel.
So, to rephrase my original comment, above, taking a holiday doesn't mean you have to go around the world for it. You can holiday closer to home. So I won't get to see the Fiji islands? I can live with that. We're not going to get out of the mess we've done and still enjoy our way of life, one way or another (the "other" being that eventually climate change will make our current way of life unfeasible anyway; for example, Fiji will sink under the sea).
People have to come to the conclusion that there is a gap between what they want, what is currently allowed and what is sustainable. The fact that something is economically viable doesn't mean it is ecologically viable.
It really makes you wonder how people lived before aviation took off ... they must have had horrible life conditions ....
When I was a kid we were too poor to afford vacations out of the country, we drove to the nearest seaside every 2 or 3 years, during summer, with no AC, and I still had loads of fun. You don't have to go to _exotic_destination_234_ to enjoy your vacations.
People won't be able to drive from Berlin to Barcelona for the weekend in 3 hours for $50 (round trip), nor book a cruise from London to NY in 6 hours for $400. It doesn't take much to imagine how the world would look like actually, since coronavirus made most touristic places either very inconvenient or impossible to visit most people stay local and discovered that their region is just as beautiful as others.
These "what will people do without all these cheap vacation destinations" comment reek of entitlement
>CO2 emissions are literally about to destroy the habitable planet, including problems with food, wars, wildfires, violent storms, flooding, and on.
This is baseless fearmongering. Even the worst-case sea rise predictions for 2100 would have relatively minimal impact on the lifestyles of most people living in developed countries.
Why do you only care about the lifestyles of people living in developed countries?
Also, even if we decide that we don't care about 4/5 of the world, increased flooding and wildfires are already affecting hundreds of thousands of people each year in North America.
I predict that more people will do a vacation in their own continent. It's not like that's super horrible or limiting. Plus I predict that we'll see more "warm jungle in a glass dome" resorts so that you can do a beach vacation without leaving your city.
Climate change sure isn't going to be fun, whether we manage to stay under the 2 °C target or not. But I don't think we should spend too much time lamenting about it. Instead, we can find ways to lower our CO2 emissions, even if it means lowering our luxurious standards of living – flying is a luxury.
If reducing air travel seems a depressing consequence of the climate crisis, it's going to get way more depressing. This is a good tradeoff to mitigate much worse things.
It's not that air travel will just disappear or anything. Some areas are simply too remote to depend on anything else.
However, up until about 8 months ago, there were lots of 15-30 minute flights that could be replaced with videoconferencing and (post-pandemic) train travel. Sure, you still might need to catch a plane if you're going on vacation on the other side of the globe, but you can usuall have that client meeting over Zoom, and if you're going on a trip from one European city to another then train travel is often not a bad option.
Your definition of reasonable is not universal. For many people, life is for living, not for sacrificing worldly pleasures to eke out as long an existence as possible.
Perhaps "suffer" isn't great here, because it's used coloquially as "being affected" and to literally suffer because of something. People will be affected, absolutely. And some people might also suffer from not being able to have an international vacation. But probably not reasonably so, i.e. a reasonable person would not suffer in that situation. You can suffer unreasonably, and you're right, it's irrelevant to the question of "does suffering exist", but it's very relevant to the question of "should we do something about it as society". If it's reasonable, probably. Otherwise that's between an individual and their therapist.
Come on, do you think CO2 is the nastiest thing planes reject ? Also, plane pollution happens at high altitude, which surely has a different impact than at sea level.
I don't think any industry was prepared for a year of shutdown. I mean early on I was like "well these companies should have had enough savings to last for a couple of months without firing people", but the world at large has failed to contain it despite the measures (mainly because measures were slackened off again because of the economy).
Citing the article: "In the near term – a timescale that matters enormously to climate change – the only way to decarbonise aviation is to fly less. As an option, that seemed plumb absurd until this year, when we were forced to learn how to live without planes."
If we've learned one thing this year it is that we can totally do a lot of things if we take a crisis seriously.
Managing climate change is about reconciling wants and emissions. It'll have to be resolved by reducing air travel a lot and pricing emissions (= making it more expensive) seems the most realistic today, even though it's not very democratic.
Good article, but I think it really misses some key stats. Here's a summary of the daily passenger statistics from the TSA [1]. We're still running around 25% of normal. The airline industry is getting absolutely annihilated this year. If Congress does not pass a new bailout, like this week, the airlines will be forced to layoff tens of thousands of flight attendants, pilots, mechanics, etc. For the most part, those are not jobs that easily transfer to other industries.
The economic devastation of coronavirus is just getting started for airlines. The lack of demand for jet fuel is going to have serious cascading effects throughout the oil and gas industry.
I'm not much of an economic expert nor do I really know how the airline industry operates, so I could be completely wrong.
My concern with an "airlines bailout" is that it is just going to prop up the industry for another quarter or two, when I don't believe that demand for air travel will return to pre-pandemic levels any time soon. So what if instead, we just allow the airlines to lay off tens of thousands of people and the money we would have spent bailing out the business side + workers just goes to the workers instead? It could even include job training or something else to help those that want to change industries. Then as demand returns many of these laid off workers can be rehired.
I don't know if this would work, but I feel like if we talking about propping up all the airlines then it's something we will be doing for several years.
You're absolutely right, that would be the better approach, but it is unlikely to succeed with the current Congress. A rational Congress would have recognized months ago that the economic effects of the pandemic are likely to persist for years, and that bailing out businesses is not going to solve this problem at all... But the Republicans are not willing to admit yet that this is going to be a problem past next summer.
you don't need to be an expert to know that you're exactly correct, all you need to do is look at how the airlines behaved when they got bailed out last time.
> So what if instead, we just allow the airlines to lay off tens of thousands of people and the money we would have spent bailing out the business side + workers just goes to the workers instead? It could even include job training or something else to help those that want to change industries.
This. Let the airlines go bankrupt but help the workers directly. If demand does come back some savvy entrepreneurs will be able to pick up the airline assets for a cheap price and get them back into business again in a few years.
>it is just going to prop up the industry for another quarter or two, when I don't believe that demand for air travel will return to pre-pandemic levels any time soon
This is 100% correct. Even if a vaccine were to be approved by the end of this year, it will take until mid/late next year before most of the developed world has received it. In the meantime, companies continue to find new ways of working remotely (I'm a tech consultant and have spent most of the last 20 years flying every week on Monday and back on Thursday, haven't flown since mid March). Extending the CARES Act airline bailout for another 3-6 months is not going to solve the problem, and continuously extending it for another 12+ months is not viable and a complete waste of money. The government should be figuring out other ways of redirecting resources idled by the pandemic, not propping up zombie companies forever.
From the standpoint of climate change I guess I don't feel so bad about this. There was much too much flying going on pre-pandemic. Now we've realized we can get by without so much. This will help reduce CO2 emissions significantly if we can sustain it longterm.
Another unintended consequence of having so many aircraft parked for so long not operating is bringing them back to life and flying them. It's never been done on such a large scale, and there have been numerous documented instances of emergencies involving fuel pumps on 737s causing in-flight shutdowns of engines due to the aircraft sitting for so long and getting in an unstable state. Boeing even had to send out a directive to all airlines to double and triple check certain components on aircraft that have sat for so long.
Aircraft, just like cars, are designed to be continuously flown and running, not sitting around.
One real question - which plane makers will survive? Unless air travel rises to higher levels than before the epidemic, there are enough spare aircraft around for a few years of no new purchases. COMAC will be supplying the China market soon, along with their client states. Airbus is subsidized. Boeing might not make it.
As a European I don't see Airbus being allowed to fall, after all it's mostly a military company which has also been busy building commercial aircraft in times of peace. The same discussion goes for Boeing, at most the US Government will nationalise it for a time.
The military activities of Airbus are much smaller than their civil revenues. You got it reversed. See their financial statements [1], defense and space is 15~20% of the revenue in normal years (and not all of it is military).
On the other hand, Boeing does make a lot more revenue than Airbus on military contracts [2]. It seems to be around 34%, and double the amount at ~$26bn for Boeing vs ~$12bn for Airbus.
I don't think those revenue percentages are representative of the true character of both Airbus and Boeing, which I personally see as military companies first, and if they happen to also be dominant in the civilian industry (hence extending their owners' economic power without the use of actual weapons) then it's all for the best, otherwise it will do. I'd say that Airbus is even more military-complex-based than Boeing, as its CEO is selected by the French and German governments combined, private shareholders be damned.
There's also yesterday's speech by French president Macron, saying that Europe needs "to end military dependence on US" [1]. There's no other company in Europe than can better achieve that goal other than Airbus (especially today, when air superiority is paramount in almost any conflict, see the present war between Armenia and Azerbaijan)
That might be your personal view but that's clearly opposite of both the numbers and the company's history. They made themselves on airliners.
>its CEO is selected by the French and German governments combined
Yes Airbus is controlled politically, although much less than in the past since states sold a lot of their stock, but that has nothing to do with having military activities.
Orange is controlled by the French state, and yet they don't do military activities. Airbus is controlled by 4 states, but it's not particularly linked to their minority of military activities.
> French president Macron, saying that Europe needs "to end military dependence on US" [1]. There's no other company in Europe than can better achieve that goal other than Airbus
Actually France bases most of its military aeronautics on Dassault, not Airbus. Airbus actually has very little military activity in France, it's mostly in Germany, Spain, and the UK.
It'll be a long time before China can produce planes domestically. COMAC doesn't even yet have a 737-class plane ready, nevermind anything more advanced.
Right. There are problems with the C919, but making airliners is a national priority for China. It's one of the areas in the China 2025 Plan. So money will be spent until it succeeds.
COMAC is still learning. Probably the airliner after this one will be good. It took Airbus 21 years to get a good airliner out the door.
If you have frequent flyer miles then consider cashing them out now. I used all of mine to buy Home Depot gift cards. I expect that many airlines will end up bankrupt again so miles may end up worthless.
I have been wondering about the long term impact of all this on airplane maintenance.
Just like the military industrial complex needs ongoing work to maintain it's domain knowledge and tooling, will the maintenance teams responsible for these aircraft end up losing key people, infrastructure and key knowledge during the shutdown?
The maintenance is still happening and it's killing the airlines on costs too. There's one (of several?) small regional airport 2.5hrs north of Toronto where Aircanada parks a dozen large planes from canceled routes. A few times a week a whole crew of maintenance workers and trucks drives all the way up from Toronto, inspects the planes, runs up each engine, then shuts them down, does any maintenance work then drives all the way back to Toronto. Been doing that for 6 months.
Suggestion: make a theme park from grounded / unused planes. A Disney World, but flight-themed, and with REAL planes (and real ex-pilots). I can tell you that a ton of boys would be excited as hell to learn how to take off and land from a real pilot. In stormy weather! I'd definitely give it a visit :-)
Friendly tip, but this could reinforce stereotypes of which genders can do which jobs. Probably not too much of an issue talking about kids wanting to be pilots on HN, but in general it's best not to gender things like this.
"...a ton of kids would be excited as hell..." works just as well, and wouldn't be in danger of making anyone feel excluded.
This is minor, no one instance will change things, but the cumulative effect is a society where women are vastly under-represented in areas like tech/STEM, or men are under-represented in child care.
"...a ton of kids would be excited as hell..." works just as well
And a ton of kids are excited. We went several times Technik Museum Sinsheim and once to Speyer and our daughter (4-5 at the time) loved peeking around in the planes.
Disregarding all politics, it's a statistical fact females are excluded from lots of activities early in their life due to giving various activities gender specific contexts. And this is a thing.
And vice versa for boys. So it's not okay to say often "this is girls|boys stuff" until people reach puberty when gender specific contexts actually start to matter.
Anecdotally, one of the silver linings is the barrier for startups operating in the airline industry has never been lower. Prior to Covid it was exceedingly difficult to get a sit-down with business development personnel at major airlines, but the situation is now largely reversed if you approach with a product/service that could even marginally increase revenue per seat mile.
I am surprised that there is not more celebration of the drastic reduction in air travel. Aside from the near-term economic impact on those in the industry (which is horrible), there is nothing else but upside. The obvious ecological gains are great, of course. In the past 2-3 decades, air travel became far too cheap, and grotesquely overused. It became the norm for a family vacation to mean flying to the destination, and a casual activity (hey, let's fly to X for lunch today!) for many. Cheap airfare + Instagram made a nightmare for many great destinations.
I'd welcome a much smaller-scale air travel industry, even if prices per ticket increase substantially.
Of course. Operating a foot-treadle floor loom doesn't pollute. Stirling engines don't necessarily pollute (unless you consider kinetic energy to be pollution).
Actually machines don't inherently pollute. Ones which do, only pollute because they're operating off of or on something which pollutes (e.g. the burning of fossil fuels).
Pollution can mean anything that alters the environment, and that certainly includes any human activity.
Pollution can mean anything that increases the probability that the parameters of the environment that allow human life will change. This can include human activity in sufficient amounts that cause environmental damage. Simples example is too many people existing, and their waste causing issues with water sources and then having to build sewage facilities and dealing with the side effects of that.
The point is that everything affects everything, and there is no “pure” solution. Causing pollution of one type might help mitigate pollution of another type, and the trade offs are impossible to completely analyze.
Obviously some pollution (emissions from fossil fuels) are easy to figure out and blame. But the benefits of those are also incalculable, such as increased life expectancy due to ability to travel, plastics to reduce disease transfer, etc.
But at its root, human activity, namely living longer and increasing number of human lives is itself the biggest polluting factor.
When modern people discuss machines, that's not what we are talking about. None of those are practical for modern travel. We're talking trains, planes, and automobiles.
although I love sailboats (compared to motor boats), they still pollute indirectly (most cruise boats have engines, they need maintenance which pollute, ..)
Bicycles too need maintenance, but it's so ridiculously insignificant compared to cars (at least my bike) that we can round to 0!
No. They do emit a lot of sulfur oxides. Not as much as power generation but still a lot. Sometimes this gets simplified to container ships are 'one of the' biggest polluters. Which is pretty misleading since 'one of the' is such a weak phrase, doubly so when simplifying it down to a specific type of pollution.
Yes that sounds good on paper but unfortunately real life does not work that way.
I am talking about a practical solution instead of focussing on 100 different things how about we focus on the main thing because right now the status quo isnt helping.
This is a very common answer and attitude in general, that I find terrible. Even if something represents 5% of the pollution compared to another 60% source, it's worth focusing on those 5% (just random numbers for the example)
Its a common answer because its practical. Saying we should work on the 5% sounds good on paper but it does not work in real life. So instead be practical and focus on the main thing (whatever that is) and go from there.
It's easier for a bunch of different teams to individually to tackle 5% problems. Even if some of them fail it's fine. And if you add up all of their improvements it's quite a lot. Whereas if you decide that one thing is the "main issue" and that turns out to be wrong later, you've wasted a lot of time and resources.
"it does not work in real life" What makes you assert so? Our experiences and the acceleration of climate changes shouldn't make us too assertive or negative, but rather humble and devoted to help the environment. It's a huge optimization problem, small gains are big gains. The average person lifestyle is quite a nonsense: an electric toothbrush+razor+vacuum cleaner and many other unnecessary devices, cosmetic products/makeup wrapped in plastics, a car and house with air conditioning, pets(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_food#cite_note-8), plane travels for holidays, 500kg of trash per year. All this should be optimized, from the smallest to the largest sources of pollution. I started with myself: I don't do any of the things listed above, my yearly garbage is 10 empty plastics bags of rice, and a few soap bars, toothpaste, bike tubes wrappings.
We keep trying to make airlines work with a ton of taxpayer bailout money. I wonder if its time to just face the obvious problem that airlines may not be a profitable way to transport people over long distances, and perhaps consider alternatives? Would high speed rail be more profitable once the initial investments are made? Are there alternatives?
Short answer, no. In the current political climate (pun intended), air travel is seen as an obscene luxury. But putting these moralities aside, it is easy to see, how efficient it is.
1. Air travel is point-to-point (for reasonably large points) practically for free. Open three airports, you have six connections. Open a fourth, you now have up to 12 connections. This kind of combinatorial growth cannot be done with road or rail (but partially with ports).
2. Air travel is quick. Flying between the US and Europe is the matter of a day. No need for intermediate accomodations, etc. On short distances, trains can compete here.
3. Air travel is relatively cheap. Not so much because of the energy used or the construction, but because of the utilization of aircraft. A modern aircraft can make multiple connections a day. This can be replicated by some fast trains, but not to that degree. It cannot be replicated by ship, except for the shortest of routes.
Conclusively, I would say that carbon-neutral or even just carbon-efficient air travel is here to stay, or traveling will become much more expensive.
In practice, everything from aluminum production that was ramped-up in WWII, to regional pork barrel, to national technology policy, to sovereign wealth fund politics, to issues of national prestige, all hide subsidization of air travel.
It may be you are right about the efficiency of air travel, but there is potentially a gap between that and reality.
Carbon neutral air travel is far in the future, and may not arrive in time to make a difference.
The tourist industry in general struggles in many countries now, similar to flight industry, due to COVID19 measures. Do you then also draw a hasty conclusion that the tourist industry is in fact "not a profitable business" in general?
Advice: if the airline isn't flying to this destination this week, if you can't see the flight on the airport's online arrival boards or on flight tracking websites, don't buy the ticket, the flight is likely fictitious.