Trains, Cranes and No More Cheap Flight Deals

It's been quite a time for the traveller lately: a couple of air crashes in August followed by a CTrain in Calgary being attacked by an Enmax crane last Wednesday. Then, Thursday saw a plane crash of a different kind, when Zoom Airlines went spectacularly out of business with the repo man turning up at Calgary and Glasgow to repossess some planes. My father, the master of bad timing, purchased Zoom tickets on Wednesday, just one day before the company collapsed, and is now fighting with anyone who will talk to him (ie the bank) to get his money back but I think there's more chance of Vladimir Putin kissing George Bush on the lips.

So, the one airline that offered non-stop, year-round flights between Calgary and Glasgow has, well, stopped and I must admit that I'm finding it quite sad, kind of like the way I felt when Freddie Mercury died, although that's kind of weird, I suppose. I liked Zoom, they were good at what they did and they made it possible for us to move to Canada without becoming totally isolated from our friends and family.

I had a thought over the weekend; suppose someone were to establish some sort of non-profit organisation, dedicated to providing affordable trans-Atlantic travel, kind of like a travel cooperative. The more I thought about it, the more excited I became - sign up 1000 people in the southern Alberta area, get them to contribute $20/month and you have $20,000 a month or $240,000 a year with which to charter planes. A volunteer executive board in the cooperative would put together a travel schedule that could be booked by the membership just like an airline and would also be responsible for the travel rota, budget planning and other administration. It all sounded great, a travel revolution no less.

Then, I looked up the cost of jet charter. In order for my scheme to be viable, I imagined giving every member the chance to travel every year, in a plane would have to accommodate at least a couple of hundred people, so approximately 5 trips per yer. But prices for chartering a commercial-sized airliner are in the region of $10,000 - $20,000 an hour, so for a nine hour flight from Calgary to Glasgow you would be looking at up to $180,000 (actually another site quoted around $300,000 for such a flight). Remember, that's one-way plus all the associated fees!!

So, maybe my idea wasn't so revolutionary after all. Even for a 30-seater jet, the one-way cost is in the order of $65,000 so, with a thousand people contributing $20 month, we could only hope for 1 transatlantic trip per year, meaning that members get to Europe once every 33 years !!!! Even with a plane that carried, say, 300 people, members would still only be able to travel once every 3 years, incurring a personal cost of $720.

Oh well. Looks like we're all stuck with the traditional transport methods for a while yet. Let's just hope that the other airlines stay in business and keep their prices decent.