Were the plastic bags always this small? I am a rusty tourist, having not crossed the threshold of an airport in years. But in a former world, I was hardly a complete novice when it came to boarding a plane. Yet here I found myself dumbfounded at how the dimensions of this dinky little sack had ever accommodated all the vagaries of a skincare regime that most women would regard as essential for a city break.
lying feels novel now. In the pre-dawn mosh of the security queue, the air was thick with the scent of developing tan. Women like myself stood with faces like luminous moons, extra pale against the contrast of skin we’d painted bronze from the neck down. Hair had been carefully trained into French braids, or had curlers pulled out of it minutes before the 5.15am taxi booking arrived. Our uniforms of big, soft tracksuits belied the cases loyally rolling behind them, stuffed with outfits carefully chosen and folded for the weekend ahead.
A lot of us have been waiting a long, long time to get away. I am sure many of those who shuffled through the scanners or heaved their cases out of the plastic trays had likely had their own travails over the last two years, which made their early-morning absconding feel even more richly deserved.
We lined up at gates beneath the names of cities both hotter and cooler than our own and, within minutes of each other, all our planes would fan out from the airport and start climbing the sky. The absence of air travel from life for so long makes this feel even more marvellous. Budget commercial air travel has run a drawstring around Europe and pulled it, bringing cities closer together, to the point that you can sleepily amble through Dublin airport at 5.30am on a Saturday morning and be having brunch in Lisbon by 9.30am.
Beneath the belt buckle of my aisle seat, flying felt very grand and luxurious indeed. And as my in-flight magazine reminded me, actually, that is exactly how it should feel. In between glossy adverts for the interminably discounted Carolina Herrera perfume and the inventory of alcohol I could buy on board my 6.30am flight, there was a new addition. Next to a conspicuous advert for a vegan sausage roll (surprisingly tasty) was a sheepish pledge from the airline to meet the net-zero emissions target by 2050, set out by the Paris Agreement.
“Based on a hypothetical scenario of no advancements being made in sustainable aviation fuel, technology, operations or regulation, Ryanair would be on track to more than double emissions by 2050 (from 2019 levels),” it said. “We recognise that this increase in emissions is unsustainable for the environment and for ourselves, so we’ve introduced Ryanair’s Pathway to Net Zero.”
My eye was drawn to a PETA logo, accompanied by the suggestion that I direct myself to the notoriously controversial animal-rights charity’s website to get myself a “free vegan starter kit”. Had I any lingering doubts about the unsustainability of air travel, this would have banished them entirely. Nothing signals the end times more than Michael O’Leary’s famously no-nonsense airline forming an alliance with PETA, an organisation that even the most climate-conscious would regard as dealing almost exclusively in nonsense as their public-facing stock and trade.
Flying away for a city break is not my right — it is a luxury, and it is long past the time I started regarding it that way. A huge swathe of us cannot reasonably argue that going on multiple flights a year is something that we simply cannot manage to do without, because we already have. Since late 2019, I’ve relied solely on staycations, which, beyond the obligatory navigation of the ever-changing government restrictions, were perfectly lovely. But as I dourly watch the price of Irish summer-holiday accommodation creep higher, foreign breaks have started to become even more seductive.
The stark reality of it is that commercial air travel will not, in future, be as frequent or as accessible as it is now. Like burning turf and eating meat all week, most of us know deep down that its days are numbered. The question is not if but when we collectively accept that we must give it up. As climate scientists made clear in the wake of the most recent IPCC report, returning to using commercial air travel in the same ways that we did before the pandemic will not and will never meet the standards of the emergency response that the climate crisis now demands.
We all like flying, so promises of electric planes can sound reassuring and promising. But climate scientists have warned that for electric planes to be at a point when they can safely cross oceans, the batteries they run on would need to be storing many multiples more energy than they are now. Waiting for electric planes to develop to this point will take so long, the whole endeavour will likely have been moot because it will have proved far too late to evade true climate catastrophe anyway.
It’s not nice to lose out on those exciting early-morning escapes, the feeling of watching sun-baked terracotta roofs come closer as you land. But the reality of the impact that budget flights are having is something we may not be able to afford to avoid any longer. The era of cheap and regular city breaks being part of our lives may have already departed.