Cheap air travel is bloody brilliant until the teeny-tiniest thing goes wrong

The Aer Lingus strike has really highlighted how cheap air travel is bloody brilliant, right up to the moment the teeny-tiniest thing goes wrong.

Yes, back in the 80s, and before the Ryanair revolution, if you wanted to fly to, say, New York, you had to sell a kidney to get there.

Really, kids today have no idea just how rare and expensive air travel was back in the day.

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My own childhood featured dreaded trips on “the ferry” to England because flying was for rich folk. And we’re not talking the almost cruise-ship like levels of comfort you get on passenger ferries today.

Back then, the old B&I were operating vessels between Dublin and Liverpool that felt like they had started out on Arctic Convoy duty in 1942, dodging U-Boats. There were winter crossings made in the 1980s to Holyhead when it felt like you should have a little group of musicians playing Abide With Me on the deck while people fought to get into the lifeboats.

I can still remember the sounds of several hundred poor souls getting violently sick in the ferry’s canteen. But when Aer Lingus said they were going to get you away, or back home, in the good old days, they meant it. Problem with a plane? They’d find another in a couple of hours.

These days, every flight seems fraught with nerve-shredding risk. Budget airlines like Ryanair are amazing on price, but make one mistake and you can get absolutely hammered on extra costs, or if there’s one problem at one little airport somewhere in Europe the whole system falls apart.

So Aer Lingus pilots don’t actually have to strike, if they just work to rule, stick strictly to their basic duties and don’t do any extra hours or flights, it royally fecks up the schedules. Aer Lingus made a profit of €220m last year and parent company IAG reported an operating profit of €3.5bn last year, well ahead of the last year before the pandemic in 2019.

But these 21st-century airlines are so profitable because they run at the very limit of what’s possible seven days a week, 365 days a year. Every extra is cut and every penny is squeezed and that includes on salaries and benefits to their workers.

And when those workers decide to hit back and demand more, it’s people who have saved all year for a family holiday who lose out, or get stranded at some empty airport at midnight in Spain, trying to figure out how to get home with zero help from the airlines.

It’s the price we pay for cheap air travel. And it’s getting too high.

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