ON March 14, 2020, I left my home in the Orkney Islands to drive to Edinburgh international airport. I was due to travel to Germany for a research trip.
Full of nervous anticipation, and making frantic last-minute preparations, I hadn’t paid as much attention to the coronavirus crisis as I might have. However, events were developing so quickly across Europe, it was dawning on me that international travel might not be an option for much longer.
By 5am, as I boarded the ferry, the radio bulletins seemed apocalyptic. On board, passengers sat separately, in their own private islands of paranoia. I wore a mask over my nose and mouth, and cleaned my armrests with a baby wipe soaked in Dettol.
In the toilets, the ship pitching beneath my feet, I scrubbed my hands for 60 seconds and examined my own reflection. Grey, I thought. Anxious.
Four hours later, I stopped in at my parents’ place near Inverness, where I ate some lunch and checked emails on my phone. I had a lot of them.
“Don’t come,” one of my German contacts said simply. Another had cancelled our meeting due to childcare problems; all schools had suddenly closed. A hotel regretfully informed me that it would not be able to honour my booking.
However, my flight was still scheduled to depart on time.
Far above, thousands of planes were still pinballing around Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas. They crowded the airspace over London, Amsterdam, and Paris, converging from all directions before spiralling down. They were launching over oceans with a cannonball momentum; weaving cleanly between each other in a mannered, balletic dance.
Normally, planes are in constant motion, massing with the daylight, but never truly ceasing, moving in predictable patterns like currents over the Earth — the invisible infrastructure of the world.
Regular routes — these elevated motorways through the sky — have grown more crowded and important as air travel increased in popularity over recent decades and became more tightly stitched into the fabric of our lives and the global economy.
In 2004, 2bn passengers boarded flights. By 2019, that figure had more than doubled to 4.5bn. On an average day, 100,000 flights or more might take off. On July 25, 2019 — the busiest recorded day in aviation — there were 230,000 flights.
In 2020, passenger numbers were expected to rise yet again — until Covid-19 brought the aviation sector to its knees. Suddenly, people were watching the news, clutching their tickets, checking for updates, and wondering what to do.
Very soon, flights would be grounded on a scale never before seen.
A year without flying — for many of us — forced major changes in the way we ran our businesses, family life and leisure time, and how we looked at the world.
As I uncertainly considered my flight to Germany, 9,100 miles away in Perth, Australia, Daria Kuznetsova and Andrew Rodger were making their own calculations.
For an international couple, “home” is a complicated proposition. They’d been in Australia for nearly a month, introducing baby Alexander to Andrew’s family, and they had tickets booked to travel back to Britain, where they had both lived since they were students.
Their tickets were valid, but something was holding them back. The Australian prime minister had just called on his countryfolk everywhere to come home. For Andrew, an Australian citizen, it felt difficult to disobey.
By returning to Europe, wouldn’t they be flying into the eye of the storm? What about Daria’s family — her parents in Washington DC, her sister in Turkey, her brother in Moscow? What would they do? Who did they have?
They debated for a few days. In Australia, they felt safe. However, when they thought about their cosy London flat, the mural on the living room wall, their baby’s cot, their books, they knew that was home and they decided to go.
The airport was almost deserted, and felt unnerving, but the plane was packed. They had unwittingly booked themselves, months before, on to what would be one of the last flights out of Australia. The atmosphere was strained, Daria recalled.
“There was a feeling that we had no idea what we were flying into. And it could be really bad,” she said.
It was a long flight, about 17 hours, direct. In the darkened cabin, Daria held Alexander over her shoulder and paced the aisles, jogging him to sleep.
As she walked, she moved in and out of earshot of passengers’ conversations. There were raised voices, determined plan-making, black humour. A few were genuinely panicked.
Daria wasn’t frightened, not exactly, but it was certainly unsettling. She didn’t know at the time that it would be the last flight she would take for many months, that she would miss her sister’s wedding, and would need to counsel her family through hard times over Zoom.
She didn’t think to wonder how long it would be until they saw their families again.
The final weeks of March 2020 saw a last mad scramble for flights before the departure boards went dark.
For those working in the aviation sector, it was all hands on deck as millions returned home via commercial air routes. Those who didn’t, or couldn’t, or hadn’t appreciated the urgency, soon found themselves fighting over the last remaining seats.
Timetables were torn up as governments chartered planes to repatriate stranded citizens. The Irish Department of Defence was drafted in to help hundreds more in particularly far-flung locations.
However, after the panic, there was an eerie silence. Airports were slowing to a near halt. Most airlines cut capacity by 80 or 90%, parking their jets on off-ramps, taxiways, and even runways.
Satellite images from around the world showed their cruciform shapes bristling from every corner, or arranged in neat, herringbone designs, wingtip to wingtip, nose to tail. Others were offloaded into hibernation in remote desert “boneyards”, their engines filled with a preservative oil and bags of desiccant distributed in empty cabins to guard against rust and mould. At one point, two thirds of all the world’s planes were grounded.
One British Airways pilot I spoke to — let’s call him John — suddenly found his schedule was bare.
“Every month, we would get our roster as normal, all the flights we were expected to do, and steadily, as the month went on, every single one would be cancelled,” he said.
From 28 March, he had 100 days without any flights.
By May, over 80 countries had suspended flights in and out. Increasingly, there was nowhere left to fly.
Pilots’ pay is tightly coupled to their workload; without payments for flight time and stopovers, John’s income was tumbling. Then he and his colleagues accepted a cut to basic pay, as part of efforts to stem job losses — although he had been at the company long enough to escape the axe himself under BA’s last-in, first-out policy.
Collapse of airlines
Others in the industry were less fortunate. Some airlines, already under financial stress, buckled almost immediately in the chaos.
Flybe collapsed overnight in early March after a Covid-related fall in bookings; Italian national airline Alitalia ceased operations in October. Overall, passenger numbers on international flights fell 75.6% in 2020, compared with the previous 12 months, making it the worst year on record for the aviation industry.
Those carriers that did survive had to think outside the box. Some retired older, trouble-ridden aircraft early, rather than fork out for their storage.
Some, such as Icelandair, converted passenger jets into cargo planes by stripping out seats; Emirates chief Tim Clark said it had converted into “a mini UPS” to get by. Finnair left business class seats in place, with only a thin curtain separating them from where packages were piled high in place of the economy section.
Many airlines slashed staff. Across Europe, about 18,000 pilots’ jobs are thought to have been lost or are under threat, along with many tens of thousands of ground staff, cabin crew, and airport workers. You can find those pilots online, posting wistful footage from past flights.
One former Flybe pilot, posting to Twitter under the handle @pilot_ems, has pinned a video of her final landing as a sort of calling card for future employers. “A manually flown steep approach on a raw data ILS… I’m available immediately,” she says.
In the meantime, she sells flight-themed T-shirts and calendars online.
It has been a major setback for new pilots, who have racked up tens of thousands of pounds of debt while training. Without regular flight or simulator time, these expensive credentials lapse within months. Regaining a “type rating” — which qualifies you to fly a particular aircraft, a Boeing 737 or an Airbus A320, say — might cost an out-of-work pilot €30,000 (€36,000) or more.
Meanwhile, John thanked his lucky stars for being at the right company for the right amount of time, and for flying the right kind of aircraft. He refreshed his roster and waited. Every few weeks he returned to the simulator to fly virtual flights over virtual worlds, as he waited for the real world to change.
Virtual worlds
Frankie Ward knows all about virtual worlds. The esports host presents arena events, where gaming championships unfold live in front of up to 12,000 fans. She estimates that in 2019 she spent seven cumulative months away from home, “ping-ponging around the world”, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Berlin, Rio, Shanghai, Miami, and Sydney; her career was taking off, and travel was part of the deal.
Her line of work involves long hours, sometimes 16-hour days, on stage and in front of the camera. It’s a high-adrenaline, emotional experience, she told me.
“At the end of it all, you travel home, and you can’t really talk for a couple of days. It’s like being hit by a truck.”
She was hosting the Intel Extreme Masters event in Katowice, Poland, when the bottom fell out — the 2020 final was played on March 1 in an empty 11,500-seat arena, after Polish authorities pulled its mass-event licence. (More than 1m tuned in online.)
After that, her work diary went blank over night.
Although the esports industry should have been well placed to adapt to an online world, there were difficulties. Normally, in-person tournaments take place using a single local server. Domestic internet connections aren’t nearly as fast or as stable; at the top levels, a fraction of a second delay might be the deciding factor in the fight for a seven-figure prize pot. It is also, it turns out, much easier to cheat when all the players are working from home.
However, with tech-friendly organisers and an existing culture of watching gameplay in real time, thanks to the streaming platform Twitch, it took only a few months to get the show back on the road. Soon, international championships had returned, and audiences were boosted by an influx of traditional sports fans looking for a new fix.
Frankie’s work schedule filled up again, but her world closed in around her. She went from travelling to five continents in a month to long days filming alone in a room in her house. She became proficient with green screens — nodding encouragingly into empty space, watching herself superimposed on to faraway rooms, with faraway people.
She soon realised that it’s one thing to shrug off jet lag while flooded with adrenaline on stage, and quite another to be working long days, in other time zones, from your spare room. She stayed awake until 5 or 6am, adapting her body clock to US or Asian schedules. It was hard. She missed sunlight. She missed her partner.
“I’d made up a bed in a different room, because I didn’t want to wake him up.”
In the end, she gave up the overnight events. On the internet, many things can be truly global, but in the end, your body — your life — cannot.
Finance sector
Finance is another sector that traditionally requires workers to undertake a lot of international travel. I spoke to one senior executive at an investment company — a Briton, based in New York — who said that, in her globetrotting line of work, she would travel long haul a minimum of twice a month, and often twice a week or more. Not long before the global shutdown, she travelled to Mexico City, São Paulo, San Francisco, Toronto, and New York in the space of eight days.
“One good thing was that I was travelling a lot to Europe, so I could tag on trips home to London,” she said.
“I felt like I was having it all: being able to live in a different country but go home frequently, and not at my own expense.”
Now, living abroad feels different. She can no longer drop in on her old life. She misses her parents, her sister, her friends.
Work, too, is more difficult and less enjoyable. “For the first year of Covid, I was mainly seeing through deals that had started pre-Covid. So I had done a lot of the relationship building, and we could go seamlessly into the virtual version. Where it gets really tough is when you’re starting something new.
It’s almost impossible to build a good relationship on a call.
"And because you don’t have that trust and familiarity, you’re probably more cautious and more indecisive than you would be in person.”
Cultural factors play a role, too: Brazilians, for example, like to do things face to face. When we spoke, she had just come off a four-hour conference call to Rio, for a deal in which the language and cultural barriers were exacerbated by being unable to interact in person.
Now that the hotel rooms, the starlit nights in São Paulo and the business-class lounge have been replaced by back-to-back video calls from 8am until 8pm, it’s a lot less fun. It’s also harder to find a few undisturbed hours for thinking, reading, strategising. It’s the same job, she said, but it doesn’t feel the same.
For scientists conducting international research, the grounding of flights caused major problems. Crucial fieldwork in the world’s most remote places had to be indefinitely postponed, including long-running climatological studies that will suffer from an unprecedented year-long gap in the data at a point when the real-time study of changes to permafrost, ice sheets, and tropical forests has never been more crucial.
Planes themselves are also valuable sources of data: commercial airliners are major contributors of meteorological observations, constantly feeding temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speed information to the World Meteorological Organisation as they cruise.
Normally, planes from 43 different airlines provide about 800,000 observations a day, but this stream nearly ran dry. Lufthansa’s contributions fell from 14,000 a month to just over 2,000; easyJet, which normally provides 16,000, sent none.
Of course, when it comes to air travel and our carbon footprints, climatologists are as hopelessly conflicted as any of us. Indeed, one 2020 study found that climate scientists, especially professors, tended to fly more often than other researchers, mainly due to remote fieldwork and the number of overseas conferences discussing international responses to the climate crisis.
One study calculated that a single gathering of the American Geophysical Union, attended by 28,000 scientists, clocked up 177m air miles. This averages at three tonnes of CO2 a scientist, about the weekly emissions of Edinburgh city.
Estimates suggest the Cop26 summit in Glasgow was responsible for the release of about 102,500 tonnes of CO2, roughly equal to the annual emissions of more than 8,000 UK residents. International flights were thought to contribute 60% of the total.
In corporate sectors, greater oversight of work-related travel has been introduced. Staff are asked to consider whether it’s completely necessary, marking a culture change in industries where jumping on a plane used to be second nature.
This could have a serious environmental impact, given that frequent-flying “super emitters”, representing just 1% of the world’s population, are responsible for half of aviation’s carbon footprint.
Before Covid, demand for air travel had been increasing by just short of 6% a year since 2010. Studies estimated that aviation would account for about a quarter of all global carbon emissions by 2050.
However, demand has been deeply affected by the pandemic, resulting in a 40% fall in related CO2 emissions, which are not expected to return to pre-pandemic levels until 2025.
Overall, Covid has thrown the challenge we face into sharp relief. In 2020, as travel bans and stay-at-home orders flickered in and out, during industrial slowdowns and the effective closure of business districts, global carbon emissions fell by an estimated 5.8% — the largest decline since the Second World War.
However, it still falls short of the 7.6% cut believed necessary to prevent the planet from warming more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
We are already returning to our carbon-guzzling ways. With jets roaring back into action, the hushed days of lockdown feel like a distant dream for those living under busy flight paths.
Lift off
I recently took my first flight south since the pandemic. Lifting off from the archipelago where I live, I watched the sunlight glimmer off the sea with a pewter sheen.
The frilled edges of the coastline spooled by below. Seeing all this, a whole country spread out below me, seemed to add a dimension to the way I understood the land and my place in it.
As my gaze zoomed out, I felt my comprehension expand, too — my sense of being part, not only of the town I live in, but the country as a whole, even the world. A world that, for the first time in a long time, seemed accessible and therefore more real.
Later, when we made our descent, I saw all London set out below me. The arch of Wembley and the cross-hatched streets, the meandering river. The plane spiralled down east over the city.
I saw the nub of the Albert Hall, the sparkling cut sapphire of a pond. There were train tracks striating the ground, long and thin like musculature, and the ribbing of the streets.
Something fired inside me that I hadn’t felt in some time. I realised how my world had shrunk these past few months, how my identity had shifted.
At the start of the first lockdown, many of us had that haunting sense that somehow we deserved all this. That we had been riding for a fall. That we had been too busy, too globe-trotting, too carefree, for too long.
It’s hard to remember that sense of moral reckoning, now that many of us have spent so much time craving international travel, many for far more crucial and heartrending reasons than my own.
The plane made what felt like a handbrake turn and swooped over Hammersmith Bridge, the whole city laid out just for me, and I thought: what a privilege it is to see the world from this perspective.
Guardian Service
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