Here is an open letter to anyone involved in the air industry, or anyone in the media reporting the failed opening of Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5 as bad news. The letter is purposefully short and easy to understand: it seems as though the increasing numbers of people who fly — living in a blinkered, rose-tinted world in which the worst thing that can happen is that you lose your luggage — can’t understand the simplest of messages.

To Whom This May Concern

A welcome side-effect, which ironically had nothing to do with the Flash Mob third runway protesters, is that the 34 cancelled flights at Heathrow yesterday prevented around 2,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. That is the equivalent of the total annual emissions of 2000 people in India, just from one day’s cancellation of a fledgling terminal at one airport.

Despite claims to the contrary by the air industry, I have a Freedom of Information letter in front of me from the Department for Transport, which says that in 2003 aircraft emissions were responsible for 5.4% of the UK’s total emissions. This has since risen considerably and will go on rising.

I have sympathy with those passengers who could not make emergency flights, such as seeing sick or dying relatives. I have no sympathy at all for those who still think that flying is an acceptable form of transport for leisure or business: put side by side with the news of the crumbling West Antarctica ice sheet (which garnered a few columns of coverage in the papers), the cancellation of a few flights is hardly worth mentioning, except in positive terms.

Yours

Keith Farnish
Environmental Campaigner and Writer