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Flying seems to be fraught with all sorts of issues of late. Southwest, an airline historically valued for its quirkiness, has ended its longstanding perks, making it much like any other airline. Boeing has been receiving a lot of criticism of late for its broken safety culture, an issue that has been going back years now. And of course, we've seen the first fatal airliner crash in over a decade. More people have recently become skeptical of air travel. While still safer than driving, that doesn't mean air travel isn't worth re-evaluating on other aspects.
First, there's the elephant in the room of how detrimental to the environment air travel has become, comprising 4% of global temperature rise since pre-industrial times. Although air travel has become more efficient, demand has outpaced efficiency increases, meaning its impact is projected to continue to rise — a sort of form of Jevons paradox. The bottom line is that the way that air travel is consumed in developed nations is completely unsustainable.
Secondly, air travel is rarely something people look forward to anymore. The romance and mystique of the early days of air travel is far gone (though admittedly, the same is true with virtually ever mode of land, sea, and air transportation today). Today, flying typically means invasive encounters with TSA that nobody likes, followed by being cramped in an uncomfortable cabin with virtually no views outside of takeoff and landing. There's also no longer anything interesting inside the aircraft itself — airline magazines, which at least provided some relief from the dull time in the cabin, are now a thing of the past. In years past, they offered reasonably interesting reading material to pass the time. Today, passengers are now expected to provide their own entertainment.
Airlines have attempted to greenwash magazine removals as a sustainability measure — Delta, the first to eliminate the in-flight magazine, said "we have found a small but significant reduction in carbon emissions through the removal of the print magazine from our flights and have made the decision to retire the publication. We continue to evaluate ways to create a more enjoyable and sustainable in-flight experience." The hypocrisy here is that this is the same airline that earlier this year announced it was partnering with cellular and satellite providers to turbocharge in-flight Internet connectivity. These partnerships promote significantly more egregious environmental harms than their in-flight magazine ever did. Delta doesn't care about making the in-flight experience enjoyable or sustainable (for that matter, neither do most of the other airlines). If they were really cared about the experience, the magazine would still be around, and if they were really invested in sustainability, they would have gotten rid of in-flight Wi-Fi, not enhanced it.
It may sound far-fetched, but one airline has actually adopted this philosophy: Frontier Airlines. When you fly Frontier, there is no in-flight Wi-Fi or entertainment whatsoever, and Frontier touts this as a benefit on their website:
You may have noticed the absence of inflight services like Wi-Fi and entertainment. These are conscious steps we've taken towards lightening the load of our planes to allow for a happier planet. — Frontier Airlines
While I would hardly call flying any airline, including Frontier, to be "green", I think it's safe to say that at least domestically in the United States, Frontier is the least environmentally harmful airline, even though ultimately, this is likely for cost reasons, with the sustainability implications being a helpful "side benefit" to market the airline to eco-conscious travelers. But with all other major U.S. airlines still retaining Wi-Fi in the cabin for now, Frontier is probably the best airline for now. There's nothing particularly good about Frontier, but it does lack some of the bad that the other airlines have.
Ultimately, we can see the results of an increasingly cost-oriented, rather than customer or eco-oriented, airline industry. Southwest explicitly slashed all its perks "to drive revenue growth". Frontier may be slightly more eco-friendly, but this is likely only a side effect of keeping costs as low as possible. And in the Delta, we can see the dichotomoy well: in the old world, in-flight magazines provided free entertainment to all passengers, which was simply a cost sink on paper. In-flight connectivity is positioned very well for classic price discrimination techniques, yielding more revenue per flight. The airlines are simply following the money.
Speaking of money, although I generally prefer taking the train to flying, on either work or personal business, cost and feasibility still remain a consideration, as they are for most people who aren't multi-millionaires. The current environment is highly skewed towards encouraging and even subsidizing airline travel, particularly outside of the northeast. When taking the train costs three times as much and takes three times as long (wiping out the rest of your PTO for the year), no matter how good the views are and how much more comfortable and relaxing Amtrak may be, even eco-conscious travelers may be forced to fly against their will, simply because they can't afford to take the better, more sustainable option, due to cost or time scarcity. That is the sad reality of transportation in the U.S., whose transportation infrastructure remains decidely second-class compared to most other developed nations today.
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