I HAD TO book a last minute flight to Canada in June. Logging onto website Travelocity at 11.30pm, I got a return flight for €630 and was on my way eight hours later.
Once more I reflected how easy and cheap airline travel is nowadays. How easy it is to buy tickets and compare prices (I could have paid from €630 to €4,000 for my ticket, depending on airline/route.) And how easy it is to get from one continent to another, in spite of security threats, ash clouds, etc. So why do we so frequently read about the trauma of air travel and why are so many people convinced it was much better in some lost golden age?
A recent FT article captured this whine: “Aviation has come a long way since people dressed up to go to the airport. Today there are terrorists with explosives in their underpants and airline bosses such as Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary who wants to charge people to use the lavatory.”
It has indeed come a long way since I started flying the Canada/Ireland route some 40 years ago. It was vastly more expensive. Airfares then were around £400 return – when my weekly salary was £5. And you would have to book around three months in advance to get a good fare. Dublin to London was around £200.
As Christoph Mueller, Aer Lingus’s chief executive told the FT: “In 1961, a first-class ticket from Frankfurt to New York and back cost the same as a new Mercedes-Benz 190D. Today, you have to pay 13 times as much for a new Mercedes as you do for the same first-class ticket.” But look how bad the service is, people moan: airports are hell, the food is tasteless, there’s no leg room, the staff aren’t as caring.
Give me a break! Airports are bearable, as long as you pack a good book, laptop, etc, and security queues are a necessity handled with surprising efficiency by many airports. The food was never wonderful, and on a four-hour European flight, so what? Pack your own sambos. Who really needs to eat on short flights? As for long flights, who really expects great food that’s mass-catered?
There was a touch of glamour about air travel in the 1950s and 1960s. But flying was still fairly novel and cheap mass transport didn’t really arrive until 1970, with jumbo jets. Now flying is everyday reality, thanks to deregulation and low-cost airlines like Ryanair, which offer cheap flights all over Europe (taken by people who moan all the way as they clamber onto its jets in their millions; others who refuse to fly budget airlines benefit from their effect on traditional flag carriers).
Flying is safer, too: when Iata started 60 years ago, its member airlines had roughly nine million passengers and 247 fatalities. “Last year we carried 2.3 billion passengers and there were 685 fatalities,” its boss told the FT.
So flying is safer, affordable and you can buy it quickly online. This may not last, once eco-taxes put up prices. Enjoy it now. This is tomorrow’s golden age.