Grounded

“Commercial airlines will probably fail within the next five years,” Kunstler declares. Spiking fuel costs are already causing carriers to cut other operating costs to the bone. “Look, we saw four small airlines go out of business in just the past ten days.”

If Kunstler isn’t buying what Branson is selling, many of us do yearn for it. Sir Richard, with his boyish enthusiasm for balloons and jets and private rocket ships, is the latest in a long line of public figures who’ve exploited the obvious metaphor of flight as human ascent, progress. He bids us not to lose faith in the heavens and our dominion over them.

The airplane was the streamlined shape of the twentieth century, a war-spawned creation that, as Le Corbusier wrote, “mobilized invention, intelligence and daring, imagination and cold reason. It is the same spirit that built the Parthenon.” If so, what new shapes, born of a similar spirit, might replace it?

On the Internet, I find images of helium-filled Zeppelins with exotic curves, luxurious staterooms, haughty observation decks. Their designers expect them to be propelled by combinations of fuel-efficient diesel motors, small jet turbines, the sun, and the wind. The Manned Cloud, designed by Jean-Marie Massaud with the French national aerospace research body onera, is intended to carry forty guests across 5,000 kilometres in about thirty hours, and is shaped like a beautiful white whale. There are also the sleek, electric-driven 250-kilometre-an-hour bullet trains already in operation in Europe and Asia; and, nearly twice as fast, the world’s first superconducting magnetic levitation train, purchased for $1.2 billion (US) from German engineers to ferry travellers between Shanghai and its airport. Japan is planning to pour $100 billion (US) into an even faster maglev train to run between Tokyo and Osaka. Technically it will fly, if just a few inches above the ground.

But this is not the future envisioned by Kunstler, who I begin to think enjoys picking the wings off humans. “It’s a mistake to imagine that the years ahead are all about leisure and recreation and we can just substitute one form for another. We are going to be living in a far less affluent society.” By then, one imagines, what’s left of the legions of business warriors striding through airports today will instead be cooped up watching video screens in teleconferencing centres. But for must of us, the business at hand will be working the land. The way we produce and transport food now is extremely fossil fuel intensive. As peak oil makes air travel a remote luxury, says Kunstler, our eyes must revert downward, toward the soil.

To this child of the jet age, it all seems a terribly hard landing. I phone my father, who retired from his aerospace engineering career long ago but still pilots a propeller-driven airplane he shares with a flying club. Can you imagine a world without air travel? I ask him. Do you think about it?

“Yes, I think about it often. And I can imagine you may see it in your lifetime. What made the airplane and jet travel possible was oil, pure and simple. And now, as our oil supply inevitably diminishes, we are entering the end of a natural cycle. Right now, those people in those aluminum tubes at 30,000 feet are there because they can be, not because they need to be.

“We will adapt,” he says, after a pause, “or not, I guess.” And he laughs.