Will your grand-children fly?

This questions was one of many posed in the documentary film “A Crude Awakening” which I showed to my Year 13 students last week as part of our post-AS stupor! It is a well made film - winner of a prize at the Zurich Film Festival - which focuses on the peak oil theory and whether technology can come to the rescue of countries that remain fixed on crude oil and its by-products.

Crude oil prices continue to touch fresh highs and airlines are piling on the surcharges. in many cases these amount to hundreds of pounds for long haul flights and there just simply has to be a negative impact on demand, surely consumers are not that price insensitive?

“British Airways, Europe’s third-biggest carrier, increased fuel surcharges by 20 per cent for premium-class passengers. First- and business-class passengers will pay a 133-pound ($262) surcharge for a long-haul flight exceeding nine hours and economy class flyers will continue to pay £109 per passenger.”

In my own case, I have been scouring the net for some late August get aways to mainland Europe and the flight costs alleid to the depreciating sterling-euro exchange rate make travelling to Euro land seem very expensive. I’ve opted instead for using the rail network of the UK to explore some nether outliers on the network as a base for some long distance walking.

Irwin Steltzer questions the very survival of many US airlines in his column in the Sunday Times today

“Their business model is broken: some will disappear; others will find ways of extracting more money from travellers, and not merely by charging $15 to check in a bag; still others will continue paring schedules and finding new ways to make passengers cuddle even closer to their fellow sufferers. But nothing they do will stop the shift from flying to tele-conferencing, from hopping on a once-cheap flight on grandma’s birthday to a congratulatory telephone call or family video conference. Yes, there will still be airlines a decade from now, but they won’t look anything like the ones limping through America’s skies in the days of $40 or even $80-a-barrel oil.”

The rest of his piece is here

The losses for US airlines are mounting up. US airlines are forecast to lose nearly $10 billion collectively for full-year 2008 and will have spent $61 billion on fuel in 2008 - more than the total fuel bill combined for the first four years of this decade.

The Guardian has a report on this here