Pilita Clark: Now it’s more a case of won’t fly rather than can’t fly

An odd thing happened on my way back to London last weekend when I got to the security line at Milan’s Malpensa airport.

I was going through the usual palaver of fishing out my laptop and liquids for screening when an official barked: “No!”

The airport now had high-tech scanning machines, she said, so everything could stay in my bag.

I blinked at her. It has been 17 years since a foiled terrorist plot to smuggle liquid bombs disguised as soft drinks ushered in the infuriating 100ml liquid limit on hand luggage. This was my first glimpse of a return to some form of normality that is slowly emerging as airports across the world install scanners like the one in Milan.

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It’s not the only pleasing flying surprise I’ve had this year.

Airlines apps that show whether the plane you’re waiting to board has landed or is still 500 miles away are a big improvement. They could be joined shortly by new ways of tracking down wayward luggage.

The need for such things was made clear in last year’s great baggage debacle, when a sky-high 26 million bags were delayed, lost or damaged by a pandemic-scarred aviation industry.

If you believe groups such as Sita, the aviation technology company, it will soon be possible to find out your bag has been lost before you know it’s missing.

Instead of landing and waiting around the luggage belt for a suitcase that isn’t there, then lining up to report it, victims will immediately get an alert about their missing bags, Nicole Hogg, Sita’s head of baggage, told me recently. They will then be asked to say online where they want the bags delivered. “You can tell how long your pizza is going to take to get to your house,” she said. “It should be no different for your bag.”

One Australian airline was trialling the system, Hogg said, but other airlines were coming on board.

All this is cheering, except for one thing. As flying goes through a rare bout of improvement, concern about what it’s doing to the climate is entering a new phase.

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This year, Jean-Marc Jancovici, a French climate expert, made what I imagined to be a wildly unpopular call for people to be limited to just four flights in their lifetime. But when pollsters asked what the French thought of the idea, 41 per cent said they were in favour. The figure shot up to 59 per cent for 18 to 24-year-olds, the consumers — and voters — of the future.

This probably should not have been a surprise. In the past three weeks alone I have come across three people agonising about flying for climate reasons, or simply refusing to do so. A mother in England wasn’t visiting children in Australia. A London father was fretting about seeing a son in Asia.

And Gianluca Grimalda, a climate researcher at Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy think tank, was making global headlines after saying his job was at risk because he refused to fly home at short notice from Papua New Guinea, where he’d just done six months of fieldwork.

As he waited for a cargo ship in Bougainville last week, he told me his contract had now been terminated and he planned to appeal. The Kiel Institute said it didn’t comment on personnel matters but had initially agreed to support his slow travel route for this trip and others.

Still, the institute has faced many complaints from what turns out to be a sizeable number of Grimalda supporters. All of which underlines one of the biggest misunderstandings about flying: it’s much rarer than you think.

Just 11 per cent of the global population flew in 2018, researchers reckon. Only 2-4 per cent went abroad and most were set to fly just once a year. A tiny group of very frequent flyers, about 1 per cent of the world population, is estimated to account for 50 per cent of commercial airline emissions.

Each one of them should enjoy any aviation advances, no matter how minor. Flying may account for less than 3 per cent of carbon emissions, but it’s hard to decarbonise and the aviation sector is growing.

If climate-minded governments ever get serious about making flights more scarce or unaffordable, a very large share of people will not care at all. — Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023