Public transport by air

When you hear the phrase ‘public transport’, what comes to mind? Probably a bus or train, often crowded, with time spent waiting on a platform or at a bus stop before you can board. Few people seem to regard air travel as ‘public transport’. But travel in modern scheduled airlines is often the most uncomfortable and sustained form of public transport most of us ever endure. We sit for hours in cramped seats, in close proximity with other passengers, whose airborne diseases are circulated round the cabin and shared among us. There may be a two-hour waiting-time before we can board, being patted down by security staff, as well as (in some cases) a walk over a windy and wet tarmac to and from a crowded shuttle bus.

Why then do many people exclude air travel from the concept of ‘public transport’? One reason may be snobbery. I remember a colleague at work turning her nose up when travel by bus was mentioned. “I don’t use public transport”, she said. This was just after she had returned from a distant conference travelling in economy class by air. Snobbery is a kind of social museum of things that once signified status. Once, air travel was confined to the wealthy, and airliners carried only a small number of passengers, each in the kind of spacious seats now only enjoyed in first class. The first jet liner, the de Havilland Comet carried only 36 passengers. I remember watching the film From Russia with Love in 1963, seeing James Bond flying to Istanbul in a Boeing 707. At that time, I had never travelled by air, and both James Bond’s destination and his means of travel seemed unimaginably out of reach for me.

But the Boeing 707, which could carry 189 passengers, really began mass public transport by air. In 1965, the first of over 10,000 Boeing 737 planes entered service, followed in 1970 by the Boeing 747, carrying over 400 passengers. Mass-produced planes with more fuel-efficient engines greatly reduced the cost of air travel, so that cheap pre-paid ‘package holidays’ in Spain became popular for people in Britain from the mid-1960s., followed by a massive growth of independent tourism to the furthest destinations. My experience is common in the UK: my wife, two children and I have, between us, been to over 40 countries, almost always by air. Air travel has become mass transit: astonishingly cheap but often crowded and unpleasant. Nevertheless, the snobbery lingers - almost as if we were still all James Bonds travelling in luxury.