Across the Northern Hemisphere, people are expressing their deepest regrets after it emerged that the airline industry wasn’t feeding the papers fraudulent bollocks when it said that this was going to be tough.
“It now seems like airlines were telling the truth when they said that a global pandemic that indefinitely stops international travel would damage their profitability,” said a business school graduate who gets paid obscenely well to state the blindingly obvious. “Many will fixate on the terrible job losses. Lots of these staff – ground crew and cabin crew – have non-transferrable but highly specialised training. It’s very sad.
“What really gets my goat is that I might not be able to fly to Florida with Norwegian for £7.50 ever again. The ability to do that is a fundamental right of the upper-middle income entitled polluter class. My partner and I will be devastated to lose that simple, seven- or eight-year-old, right. Do you have any idea how many hours I’ll need to spend revving a jet ski in circles off the Costa Del Sol to match that the carbon emissions of a budget mid-haul flight? It’s disgusting”
Airlines, which took no lessons at all from 2001, prepared for the possibility of another catastrophic demand shock by ploughing all their profits from a decade-long period of prosperity into stock buybacks and generally squandering huge piles of cash.
In brighter news, the changing shape of commercial aviation may finally put a stop to the much-maligned Prague/Zagreb/Bucharest/Budapest stag and hen do.