After flying into the financial turbulence of the Covid pandemic, the airline sector expects passenger traffic to take off despite concerns about the industry’s impact on climate change.
As with the September 11 attacks or the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, “the industry will prove resilient again,” Darren Hulst, vice president of marketing at Boeing, said last year.Marc Ivaldi, research director at the Paris-based School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, noted that only one percent of the population currently uses air travel.
In many emerging countries where the middle class is expanding air travel is becoming possible for more and more people. “For these new would-be flyers, the whole concept of ‘flight shaming’ at a grass roots level is grossly alien,” said CAPA.The “flight shaming” or “flygskam” movement took off in Sweden in 2018 to challenge the growing popularity of air travel, which had boomed in Europe thanks to budget airlines that made weekend getaways across the continent affordable to a wider public.