This morning I received an email from Ryanair, describing the precautions they have put in place to deal with Covid-19. Far from reassuring, these precautions indicate what an even more miserable business flying is going to become. On top of all the usual indignities of flying — the cramped conditions, the endless waiting around in soulless airport lounges — everyone will now have to wear a face mask at all times.
For those of us who find the recycled air of the airplane cabin already disturbingly artificial, this will feel like a suffocation. And no, my kids won’t keep theirs on. And yes, the people sitting next to us will have a go at them for this. Also, there will be no queuing allowed for the toilets — maybe we will have to take a numbered ticket — so it’s probably best if you just hold it in. And if, on the morning of travel, you wake up with a temperature, they are going to send you home.
What was already a pretty hellish experience is about to become doubly so. Presumably, with demand collapsing, we are all going to have to pay more for the pleasure. And who knows what you are going to catch cooped-up in some metal petri dish for hours on end. Social distancing? In economy class? I don’t think so.
Flying was supposed to be freedom. Our access to a few days of sunshine. An escape to other worlds, a chance to broaden the mind. Well, if this is freedom you can stick it where the sun don’t shine. I will shed no tears for the demise of cheap flying. You don’t have to be a member of Extinction Rebellion to care about the effect that mass air travel has had on our planet. There will be much to celebrate when these polluting monstrosities are grounded.
But what of that cliched assumption that travel, and air travel in particular, is a mind-expanding experience — that travel is inherently educational, a chance to experience new cultures, different food and languages, a way of coming to appreciate that the way you think about things is not the only way to think about things? Before air travel, such experiences were the preserve of the rich, going on their grand tours. With cheap air travel all this was democratised. And so, for many people, the world has become a bigger place. This mind expanding aspect of travel is fundamentally moral. As Mark Twain put it in The Innocents Abroad:
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”
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