"CJG Now Thankfully Living In The North" wrote in
message om...
.

There is no "need" to have massive expansion in air travel, most
expansion
comes from people going on budget holidays, i.e. things that are not
essential for the general operation of our society.


If you mean Budget Holidays as in the expanison of budget airlines
flying from airports. Business travellers are tending to go more by
budget airlines. Why should a business pay three times the amount just
so its middle manager can have a leather seat and a cup of tea for
free on their one hour flight?

To be honest, I am not sure quite a lot of these meetings have any value at
all. The managers fly out there, stay in an expensive hotel, then meet for
about an hour and have a chat which usually doesn't actually do anything
productive and ends with "i'll e-mail you with the details and we can take
it from there". Great, could have done that in the first place.

And the other big growth that has helped budget airlines has been the
growth in number of people with second homes in Spain and France
flying there for the weekend.
Whilist I would agree rich people sipping red wine in their second
homes should be forced to sell the home and give the money to homeless
people. I think that budget holidays are essential. Poor people should
be allowed to travel aboard too. Have you ever been to Cleethorpes and
Scarborough? You can see why us poor folk would rather leave the
country than go there. Lots of things are not essential for the
general opreation of society. i.e alcohol. Try banning that. But think
about the benefit to society. Instead of saying lets rise prices so
only rich people can fly. Lets embrace the fact that more and more
people can fly. The world is getting smaller. Lets celebrate it.
Especially today. Celebration of 100 years flight and that (unless you
read the Guardian and then your belive flight was invented by a
Brazilan)

Celebrate the world by destorying it? The problem is like this: air travel
causes a lot of pollution, and we have to ask the question of how to we
ensure that all those trips are absolutely necessary?

Well, the only method that we can be sure works is by price. A high price
will force users to judge how necessary their flight is. Just look at the
drop in traffic after congestion traffic, all of these journeys that were
"absolutely essential" or "could not be made any other way" were obvious not
essential enough to warrant £5 expenditure.

Yes pricing the poor out of the skies is a social injustice, but it could be
argued that is merely caused by the ever widening gap between rich and poor
in this country - a totally seperate issue!