Flybe, renamed Virgin Connect:

“Connect Airways chief executive Mark Anderson said the airline could stop flying between airports where the journey can be made easily by train or car…]

[…”Maybe there are some routes in the future, as I look at the future of Virgin Connect and how we’re connecting people to their world, that we will potentially not fly.

“We will potentially say ‘Actually this makes more sense by train or this makes more sense by road’, and maybe in the future we’ll get behind that as well.”

Very curious to signal your responsibility as a "sustainable” airline by suggesting people switch from flying to driving.

However to be fair, for a car with four passengers in a country with lots of coal and/or gas in the electricity generation mix (e.g., UK = 45%), it can become competitive with a train.

A car with one dude in it: never.

In France’s energy mix? Never:

Ok, so Virgin Connect is considering cancelling some of its short-haul flights.

It took a Yellow Vest protestor at a public talk on aviation emissions at La Base in Paris to drive home to me the fact that we should be careful what we wish for.

If an airline permanently cancels a specific A to B flight, it frees up a slot at both the departure and arrival airports.

It is what happens next with these slots that is important, not the cancellation itself.

What if the airline fills the short-haul flight’s slot with a long-haul one? Or sells it to another company that intends to do so?

The environmental problem just got worse, not better.

The solution, as put forth by my Yellow Vested buddy, is that the slot has to be closed.

Permanently.

Otherwise we’re just pissing in the wind.

One final quote from the Virgin Connect article:

“He added that airlines have made “great progress” in improving their sustainability in recent years, but acknowledged that the industry “has more work to do in improving its carbon footprint”.

This is the kind of shit cigarette company executives peddled for years.