The news came through on Twitter yesterday evening, via Jon Ostrower, and was confirmed in the early hours. BA is retiring its fleet of Boeing 747s, with immediate effect. I confess to having mixed feelings about this. Given all that I’ve written here about airlines and international travel, part of me is happy to see them go: they are aging and inefficient. Another part, a romantic part I suppose, has fond memories of flying on 747s over the years, albeit that the last time was Beijing to Heathrow in February 2013. I know they’re aging and would be retiring in a couple of years anyway, but they were unquestionably magnificent pieces of technology.
I was interested in the internal memo that BA sent around staff. It said, amongst other things:/
The whole airline community is reconciling itself to a bleak outlook for passenger demand. Long haul travel will take years to recover, with the major industry bodies agreeing that we will not see a return to 2019 levels until 2023 at the soonest. The bulk of our fleet is large, wide-bodied, long haul aircraft with many premium seats, intended to carry high volumes of customers.
That 2023 estimate at the earliest jumped out at me. As regular readers will know, I am increasingly of the view that it should never get back to normal, that we need to look at the consequences of quick international travel. It’s something that I’ve benefitted from in the past, and obviously there are a lot of livelihoods hang off it, and I have close family in the US in particular whom I want to see. But I can’t escape the principle. Something has to change.
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The Prime Minister apparently said something this afternoon about aiming for some kind of ‘normality’ by Christmas. This, remember, is a man who relies on advice from (and jettisoned his public health policy to protect in the middle of a pandemic) a chap who thinks the best way to test your eyes is to go for a drive in the country.
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I watched a couple of Marvel blockbusters today, Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame. Both films looked somewhat like relics from another age. Captain Marvel was fun, as it usually is when I watch it; the first part of Endgame was really weird to watch now. The whole of the sequence where Antman reappears after five years and wonders what has happened has a very different feel in the current world.
Obviously, Covid-19 is not Thanos’s finger snap, but there is a resonance that wasn’t there before. It doesn’t make it a better film, but it does make that section different; and what has changed is the mindset of the viewer, or, at least, this viewer.
It also struck me (over-thinking it) as seriously ambiguous morally: the good guys correct the bad thing Thanos did by doing the same to him, an eye for an eye. Thus the act itself draws it’s moral acceptability because of who did it to whom. Famously, Superman was based around the idea of truth and justice being the American way. Avengers: Endgame focuses on a very different American sensibility, rooted in a particular view of the Old and New Testaments–retributive justice and (assumed) redemption. In short: exceptionalism.
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Music: In something of a compliment, Joni Mitchell once kicked off a concert in London saying she’d like to open with a Nazareth song. Dunfermline’s finest.
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