How disguting, do Ryanair have no shame?
As if they don’t have enough controversy on their hands, Ryanair now want to charge more for overweight passengers who fly with them.
Follow Up (8th May)
Well it seems like the story has been picked up in a few forums over the bank holiday weekend. No idea why they’re only getting it now, but I guess that’s the nature of search engines.
So, how many a serious point is said in jest?
One nice thing about a blog is that I don’t have to do all the research myself. If we publish a news article, we do at least need to make reasonable efforts to check that what is being said is correct.
So, these are some questions I’ve never got round to answering, but I’d love to see some comments:
Just having a scout round a few other posts on these new Newquay flights, and I came across an article in the Ecologist, with the headline:
“BA ‘fly in the face of science’ with Newquay flights “
Just exactly what science are they flying in the face of? If we are talking about the hotly debated issue of climate change, then they should remember that BA are at the forefront of carbon trading initiatives, and that they have never tried to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist - even though there are still plenty of scientists out there who would say it doesn’t, or that if it does, that we’re really not the culprits.
If they are saying that we should reduce our dependency on domestic flights, then fine - but did they ever check to see where this plane was going before they launched their tirade? No, they did not. The answer is Glasgow - another domestic destination, and one which IS served by DIRECT, ELECTRIC powered trains.
The article then goes on to state the so-called science:
“Greenpeace campaigner, Emily Armistead, said that BA’s decision to open the route – especially in the light of a new high-speed rail link which will open later this year – flew in the face of science:
‘Planes are ten times more damaging to the climate than trains, so if we don’t do something about the growth in aviation Britain will find it very hard to meet its global warming targets,’ she said.”
Newquay airport have meanwhile issued their own rebuttal, claiming that:
“Eight coach HST (High Speed Train) with 472 seats emits 12,170 g/km of CO2; at 30% occupancy (i.e. 140 seats), a standard occupancy rate used for UK rail travel, equates to 0.04 tonnes per passenger; for 105 pax (equivalent to 75% occupancy on a Boeing 737-400) the equivalent figure is 0.05 tonnes.”
We have no reason to dispute the 30% occupancy claim about the trains - and perhaps if Greenpeace activists spent more time on them, they’d realise that this is quite realistic! Over-crowding grabs the headlines (remember how the Cumbria incident was initially reported as being a ‘packed’ train to add more impact to the headline?). The reality is that outside peak times, trains are just very good at moving around huge volumes of air. The further away from London the train gets, the more passengers get off - and since when will the tin-pot branch line to Newquay be a high speed route? It might be scenic, as is the route along much of the way, but please stop pretending it is quick!
So far, this route seems pretty unpopular, if the numbers on the inaugral flight are anything to go by. One thing is certain though - if the route is a flop, it will get dropped like a hot potato. Train companies just can’t, and won’t do this.
So, the claim that “planes are ten times more damaging to the environment than trains” is utter garbage - nonsensical, unethical, and totally unscientific. But do Greenpeace provide further justification of their figures? No, they are far too busy going on their headline-seeking rants, knowing full well that they will get the media support they want, and that their figures will rarely be scutinised.
Does it matter then if flights are still more environmentally damaging, but “only” by a factor of between, say, 50% and 200%, and not the 1000% that Greenpeace are claiming?
Yes it does - because there is a huge difference in logic between the two. If trains really are super-clean, as could be said for the Swiss system, where virtually all of the network is electrified, and where far more electricity is generated from HEP, then the environmental case for using them is compelling. If the difference is only by a small factor, then surely any efforts to reduce transport’s emmissions should be targetted at ALL modes of movement, not just flights? And how come, all of a sudeen, environmentalists have started saying that flying is worse than “driving and going by train”. It isn’t! It all depends on the journey being undertaken, the directness of the route, the fuel or power source, and perhaps most importantly of all, the levels of occupancy.
So if you are really concerned about science, there is only one place for the kind of nonsense spouted by Greenpeace - the recycling bin.
As usual, it looks like the green lobby missed a trick with their pointless protest against BA’s new flights from Gatwick to Newquay, which started this week.
They chose to target the CO2 emmissions of the industry as a whole, and to say that these flights should not be needed, because the route is a very short one, and people should travel by train instead for domestic journeys.
Newquay airport countered by saying that the train service to Newquay was actually pretty lousy (let’s face it, it is), and that a fair comparison needs to take into account that trains usually only operate at 30% occupancy.
Their figures suggested that the CO2 emmissions per passenger for the flights would be no greater than the train journey, because these flights should be around 75% full.
So when Greenpeace turned up to give their usual tirade, it looks like there were almost as many protesters as passengers, since only 34 people turned up for the Gatwick to Newquay leg. There were also just 18 passengers on the return flight.
Considering all the free publicity that Greenpeace and chums have given BA about this new route, I would have expected more people to have wanted to use it. Of course, it is early days yet, but as we already commented last week, this route now has three airlines competiting against each other. I would still expect more passengers to travel with Air Southwest, who offer a much higher frequency of service on this route.
Maybe this route will pick up over the summer, maybe it will not, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to see it quietly dropped at the end of the season.
Then, Greenpeace can have their little organic beer party and dance a merry jig about the nanogram of C02 which will have been saved, but the simple reality is that this route will thrive or fall on pure commercial logic. As it happens, commercial logic will also be environmental logic, as is so often the case.
It seems that the Conservative party have blindly jumped on the directionless and disingenuous bandwagon which seeks to penalise people who take domestic flights within the UK. Last week, the Independent carried a front-page article about British Airways’ new flights to Newquay, claiming that the airline was being irresponsible by starting a new domestic route — even if this service was merely a reallocation of a previous Glasgow rotation!Of course, the industry needs to cover its environmental costs, but in the rush to go carbon crazy, we seem to be shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to protecting our own domestic market. As coverage of the British travel trade fair in Birmingham has pointed out, 80% of the UK tourism market is fed by domestic visitors, yet anyone who chooses to fly to internal destinations is now being penalised by two sets of air passenger duty, instead of just one. How can we persuade a family of four from Belfast to take a short break in London, which is already one of the most expensive cities in Europe, when they will have to fork out £80 in air passenger duty? Instead, this family could drive down to Dublin airport, and take a short break to Spain, and pay no air passenger duty at all on the outbound journey, and a mere €5.78 each on the return — despite the fact that the flight to Spain will be almost 3 times as far.At least bed tax proposals seem to have been dropped for now, but if we are going to be serious about asking more people to take their holidays in the UK, then this will inevitably mean we will have to build more accommodation facilities along the South Coast. This will no doubt bring the travel industry back into conflict with an untold number of nimby groups, crewed by the very people who are trying to stop us from flying to more distant destinations.
Whilst any policy measures to encourage the development of more high-speed rail routes should be broadly encouraged, the West Coast Mainline upgrade has already shown us just how massively over budget these projects can run — so much so that the (allegedly unpaid) carbon cost of a flight from Birmingham to Edinburgh is significantly less than the subsidy handed out to the railways for the short train journey from Birmingham New Street to the airport!
Any transport infrastructure needs to balance its social and environmental impacts with its financial costs, but it would be disastrous to give the rail industry blank cheques in the name of combating global warming, especially as domestic flights make up such a tiny proportion of aviation’s contribution to the problem.
I will start the Flightmapping.com blog on the hotly debated topic of the recent doubling in Air Passenger Duty (APD).
Nothing wrong with “polluter pays” principle
Before I launch into my tirade against Gordon Brown, and his hugely ill judged tax raid, I should start by saying that I have absolutely no objection whatsoever to the “polluter pays” principle, or to the broad notion that the aviation industry needs to do more to clean up its act. Furthermore, I might derive most of my income from the sale of flight tickets, but I don’t think that my involvement in this industry should give me any reason to bury my head in the sand on what is clearly a very important topic. And, just for the record, I do think more should be done to encourage a modal shift from short-haul flights to high speed trains, and often travel by train up to Scotland, when I could perfectly easily fly.
So, why do I feel so strongly about the recent increase in APD, when all that Gordon Brown has done is restore this tax back to the levels that it was at when Labour came into power in 1997? Considering how many other stealth taxes have been introduced, wasn’t it always an anomaly that flights were one of the few things which had effectively been de-stealthed?
Bad application
Gordon Brown’s first major folly was to announce a rise in APD, and then to apply the extra charge immediately to all flights from February 1, including those which had already been booked. There is no plausible explanation for the necessity to apply the APD rise with such haste. It worryingly smacks of extreme government desperation for extra cash, and it has also created a totally unnecessary sense of ill feeling amongst both airlines and passengers, who are having to stump up extra money for flights they reasonably believed had already been paid for. To borrow an analogy from Easyjet’s managing director Andrew Harrison, this state sponsored thievery is no different to the manager of the local off-licence calling round to your house, and demanding £1 for every bottle of beer or wine you have bought from them, but have not drunk yet.
Bad timing
Environmentalists have often been heavily critical of airlines for not wanting to address the environmental impacts of their emissions, and for a long time, these criticisms were entirely valid. However, over the last few months, many of the UK’s major airlines have started to respond to public opinion, and to work together on a number of different schemes to offset their carbon emissions. Some tour operators had also been looking at voluntary carbon offset payments to add to their booking processes, whereas the no-frills airlines had tended to concentrate on extolling the virtues of their ultramodern, highly efficient fleets.
Whilst it might be perfectly true to say that airlines have been dragging their feet on these issues, discussions between them and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) were clearly very well advanced at the time that the APD increases were announced, but Brown’s short sighted idiocy has totally scuppered these delicate negotiations. The airlines have now called off the talks with DEFRA, and we are left with the worst possible scenario – passengers being rinsed of huge amounts of cash, little of which will go on green causes, alongside bitter airlines who feel they are paying more than enough for any environmental damage they cause.
Bad reasoning
The typical carbon cost of a one way European flight is in the region of £1 (if we go by DEFRA’s own figures). With APD now set at £10 on European flights (giving a 1000% markup to the government), it should be perfectly clear that the recent tax increases have been brought in for the sake of swelling government coffers, with the environment being used as a convenient smokescreen.
By all means, it is perfectly reasonable that a largely discretionary commodity like airline tickets should make a fair contribution to the general Exchequer, but airline passengers should not be deceived in any way shape or form into thinking that this is done for environmental reasons.
Some anti-aviation campaigners have often wondered why flight tickets are not subject to VAT. Whilst much of the reasoning for this goes down to the international nature of most air travel, there have been some moves within Germany to levy VAT on domestic flights. Whilst this sounds like a perfectly plausible suggestion, environmentalists conveniently forget that domestic flights are already disproportionately taxed, and APD is applied on the return journey as well as the outbound flight. Airlines will also readily point out that comparisons between the cost of aviation fuel, which bears no duty, and the petrol or diesel used in cars, are not entirely fair, considering that no other form of public transport pays fuel duty either.
Bad for the environment
The basic environmental theory behind increasing APD is that by making flights more expensive, people will be less inclined to travel by air, and that the “rapacious” demand for cheap flights can then be curtailed. Whilst this argument might be true in a broad sense, any seasoned commentator on this issue will easily point out how tax increases alone are an extremely blunt instrument. Airlines like Easyjet have also repeatedly called for the hypothecation of these taxes, i.e. that revenue raised from air passenger duty should be used towards environmental improvements. Whilst there will never be a perfect taxation system (notwithstanding the fact that emissions trading also has its flaws), there are a number of very legitimate concerns about the current application of APD, namely:
Bad precedent
If our bookings for January are anything to go by, then these latest APD changes have done little to dampen the public’s enthusiasm for cheap flights. No doubt environmentalists and politicians would argue this justifies even more tax rises, rather than trying to think through a more coherent long-term green policy. Considering that both global warming and air travel are inherently international issues, then we really do think this is one area that countries need to work together on.
With the newly re-branded Conservatives trotting out the “go green, vote blue” mantra, we have every reason to suspect that flights will be an easy target for both Tony Blair’s immediate successor, and for whichever government holds the reins of power after the next general election. The environment is clearly going to be more of a winner than it ever has been, but no politician should pretend that all environmentally conscious voters have windmills on their roofs and cycle to work.
Countless surveys have shown that most people will accept paying more for commodities like flights, if that means that the extra revenue raised will be spent on environment projects, but politicians should also not forget just how much the no-frills airlines have truly democratised the skies, and brought about many travel opportunities which have never previously existed.