CONSUMING INTEREST
The pains of the jet age
LESLIE ADRIAN
John Ruskin didn't regard going by train as travelling; it was, he said, merely being 'sent' to a place—little different from the treatment received by a parcel. What rail travel was to him, air travel has become to many of us. An exciting and even romantic experience for the novitiate, perhaps, but for the regular traveller, just being 'packed into a metal sau- sage' (as Design magazine nicely put it) and then emptied out like the luggage, on to a made and malfunctioning whirligig. We en- dure it all—the imprisonment, the tedium, the noise, the herding, the queuing, the over- frequent disappearances of suitcases the never-ending walks down Kafkaesque cor- ridors—because we think we're in a hurry. But how much better (and cheaper) to make haste slowly.
The last time 4 saw Paris it took seven hours, by car, boat andtrain, from my home" to the Place de la Concorde. And I arrived in high spirits. On the previous occasion it had also taken seven hours—including wait- ing for the plane at one end and circling round before landing at the other. And then it took an extra seven hours to regain com- posure. Yet the old-fashioned journey cost little more than half the new-fangled.
If the wear on our nerves cannot be re- duced the strain on our pockets certainly
can. Average air fares in western Europe are now about 50 per cent higher than in the
us and in Australia. Why? Because IATA (the International Air Transport Associa- tion) is a cartel—a producer organisation which in effect fixes fares for nearly two- thirds of scheduled traffic in Europe, com-
pared with barely 2 per cent in North America and Australasia. Like most modern monopolists, its high prices result less from high profits than from high costs. These, as the Swedish economist Arne Rosenberg de-
monstrates in a recent book Air Travel with- in Europe, are due almost wholly to the peculiarities of the IATA set-up, whose price-
fixing doesn't prevent the airlines of our still balkanised Europe from competing by means other than price cuts. A fully integra- ted monopoly wouldn't have allowed such costly competition, and would thus have eliminated low utilisation of aircraft, too frequent model changes and preposterously inflated costs of selling and advertising. But equally, if competition had extended to prices, the less efficient airlines would quite properly have disappeared.
As it we suffer the sort of situation de- scribed by Mr Harry Chandler, chairman of the Tour Operators' Study Group, at an international seminar in Zurich last month:
'An unpopular or unsuccessful airline can attract passengers by pointing out that it's more comfortable to sleep full length across three of its empty economy class seats than travel first class with its more successful rival. Such attempts to identify the airline possibly divert traffic from one to another but do nothing to expand the market. The same amount spent on fare reductions would expand the market, particularly in holiday travel'. So millions of potential air travellers in Europe are grounded by these keep-fares- high practices. The average American. for example, flies ten times as much as the aver- age European. and even the average Russian four times as much. Though philosophy
teaches that abstention from flying (as from fleecing) has no' moral value to its practi- tioners if it comes about by financial or other duress, society may still say : for this relief much thanks. Just fancy a ten-fold increase in Britain's jet set. Might it not involve Mr Peter Masefield's demanding of the Roskill Commission that it find a site for the thirtieth London airport?
But in fact even this doesn't justify the monopoly. A substantial increase in world passenger traffic—which the jumbos and their successors may double in the next five years and quadruple in the next ten—need not necessarily mean a corresponding in- crease in airport disamenities. Arne Rosen- berg, indeed, suggests that one way to cut costs might be for passengers to by-pass air- ports and be transported -direct between city centres and aircraft : 'Even if specially de- signed buses were required a lot of money could be saved in eliminating present and planned huge airport structures, if such a system permitted the transfer of routines like the check-in, passport and customs for- malities, collection of airport fees etc., to the bus.'
The dimensions of the present airport buildings are actually a symbol of the bottleneck in air travel that they are. Ros- kill has already forced a closer look at what can be done with existing airports, and pushed the need for London's third airport from the mid-'70s forward into the '80s. With the coming extension of the Piccadilly line to Heathrow and the promise of special arrangements on trains and at stations, dare we hope that in the end we may not need a third airport at all?
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