Celebrate the Freedom of Flight

As Heathrow protesters caused delays for families setting off on summer holidays, the Manifesto Club celebrated the freedom of flight. Read the statement below from James Panton; and see our Freedom of Flight campaign page.

‘The vast expansion of flight over the past few years – particularly cheap flight – has been experienced as a liberation for millions of people. It is no longer only the well-to-do who can glimpse the canals of Venice or the pyramids of Egypt, or relax on the beaches of Greece. The option of a weekend away in Prague or New York means foreign travel can now easily be fitted into the working week.

We should not apologise for flying. On the contrary, we should celebrate the freedom that flight can bring us.

More and ever cheaper flights mean that we can maintain relationships across the world. We can meet at conferences in different countries; we can keep in touch with friends from other continents, and have lovers in far-flung places. Emigrants can return home every year, rather than just sending the occasional letter. Or we can just take a weeklong summer holiday with the kids in guaranteed sun.

The dream of flight has long captured the human imagination. The development of plane flight in the twentieth century was the result of great leaps – both leaps of imagination, and literal leaps of the curious and the crazy who flung themselves from cliffs and bridges, and launched themselves into the air to test their theories, sometimes at great personal cost.

The anti-flight, anti-airport protestors at Heathrow are right on one thing: airport authorities and airlines are not charitable foundations; they are in it for financial gain. But the growth of those industries is fuelled by the public appetite for travel. And the public are not simpletons duped by cheap flight deals; they are people taking advantage of the cosmopolitan experiences that air travel can offer.

The authorities and airlines are right on something too: Heathrow airport, like many others, needs significant reorganisation and development. The queues are too long and the waiting is too great. There are too many planes on too few runways. Whatever the practicalities, the future must lie in expanding flight provision, not cutting it back.

But airport authorities and governments also have a great deal to answer for. It is their ludicrous security measures that are the cause of so many of the queues - lining passengers up like cattle, confiscating lip salve, squeezing cosmetics in regulation-size plastic bags, asking mothers to test their babies’ milk. What should be the quickest, easiest and most pleasurable form of transport has become a drag, and an utterly dehumanising experience.

The current public discussion about flying fails to recognise the role that flight plays in our daily lives. Up to 1.5 million of us pass through Heathrow every week in the summer months, but we are being asked to limit our travel or atone for our emissions with carbon offsets.

Flying can be, and despite the many problems, often is, experienced as a liberation. Through flight we have access to new experiences and cultural exchanges, and the world is brought closer together.

However much environmentalists ask us to feel guilty for every flight we take, the reality is that we continue to fly – more often, for longer, and further. The possibility of a cleaner, faster and more efficient system of air travel is well within our grasp.

The Manifesto Club is launching a campaign webpage, 'Celebrate the Freedom of Flight’. We are asking you to send in your accounts of the benefits of flight - a trip that changed your life, a visit to long-unseen friends or family overseas, your plans for a summer in the sun; or your thoughts on the freedom and ease that flight does, and could, bring. Email these to info@manifestoclub.com.

Together these accounts will give a picture of the positive meaning of flying – a counterpoint to the idea that flight is nothing more than the spewing of carbon dioxide molecules into the atmosphere.

Last year 4.4 billion passengers passed through airports across the world; strange then that flying has become the good that dare not speak its name. So let’s speak it, and answer the mean-spirited moralising of protesters and politicians alike.'

James Panton, Manifesto Club