By Chris Davey
This month, I’m returning to the subject of aviation. Over the years, it has been quite an interest of mine, but I now see it as something we must re-evaluate. As a boy, I was fascinated by aircraft, and where I grew up in outer London, was able to watch planes arriving and departing at Northolt, then an RAF base, and Heathrow, as my grandparents lived virtually on the western Heathrow glide path. But civil aviation seemed a bit tame, so I wondered about joining the RAF; the then front-line interceptor, the English Electric Lightning, capable of mach 2, seemed like a lot of fun to fly.
Then as a teenager, I had to start wearing glasses, and at that time glasses were made of glass, so it was deemed to be too dangerous to fly a combat aircraft with two little glass windows on your face. Also, it occurred to me that although flying one of those planes might be fun, they were equipped with cannon and usually two infrared homing missiles, and one day I might be ordered to use them to kill people…hmm. I’d begun to enjoy the music of one James Marshall Hendrix, and as Jimi sang in Hey Joe, “that ain’t too cool”. So that was the end of that.
Another interest of mine was photography, and for a while I combined the two, taking photos of planes at airshows and airports. Then eventually we actually got on a plane as a family, and had a holiday in Spain; more hols followed, in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Greece – the usual southern Europe destinations. But after some years, I got really fed up with airports. Now I realise that security has to be rigorous, and especially after 9/11, I wouldn’t have it any other way; but having to empty my pockets, take my iPad out of my bag (once I nearly forgot to pick it up again), and take my belt and shoes off before nearly every flight – well it seemed a pain after a while. And queueing; OK, the only practical way to handle a queue of a couple of hundred people is probably to zig-zag them across a huge room, shuffling forward a few cm at a time. But in the end I’d had enough of all that.
I was also beginning to hear and read more about what was happening to our climate, and that burning fossil fuels was largely to blame. Well, tons of kerosene were being burnt and the gases pushed into the air to get us to and from sunny southern Europe, so that had to stop. (Which meant we then discovered Eurostar and the marvellous TGVs across France to the Côte d’Azur, so at least that was a win. Of course, security at Eurostar is also tight, but somehow it doesn’t seem so bad!)
So I’d gone from thinking flying was fun, and sort-of OK, to “I can’t do that anymore”. Having looked into this some more, I discovered:
- CO2 from flights is about 2.5% of the total; but the add-on effects, e.g. soot particles from turbofan engines, and contrails, roughly double that.
- Only about ten percent of people in the world fly; even in rich countries such as the UK, it tends to be the better-off people who fly.
- People in the global South, most of whom don’t fly, and probably never will, suffer the most from climate breakdown.
- 90% of flights are for non-business purposes, mostly holidays.
- Aviation is forecast to increase substantially in the coming years – because affluent people are flying more, NOT because poorer people are beginning to fly.
- Greenwashing “savings”, e.g. by airports having PV solar on their large roofs, or having EVs on the ground, will be wiped out many times over by aviation’s expected expansion.
- SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel, is a misnomer; it is not sustainable
So quite a turnaround for me. But not as much as it was for George Hibberd and Todd Smith: they also had the “I can’t do that anymore” thought, but it had considerably more serious implications for them, because they were career airline pilots. See their story at www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHHA0tilyzQ
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More info at flightfree.co.uk
Other source: Does Aviation Have A Place In A Low Carbon World, with Kevin Anderson on YouTube.
