In the final years of the Second World War, the UK aviation industry was singled out in the corridors of power as a strategic driver of post-war recovery (Barnett, 1995; Engel, 2007; Edgerton, 2018: 189–90). This state sponsorship rapidly coalesced around a regime of aviation expansion which was predicated on a predominant social logic of ‘predict and provide’ (Adams, 1981; Dudley and Richardson, 1998). ‘Predict and provide’ was inscribed in the apparatus of the state and government, spelling out an administrative rationality that informed the energies of ministerial staff in planning and delivering additional airport capacity, where the latter was deemed necessary to meet the predicted exponential growth of passenger numbers. Hence, aviation policy was strategically pared down to the interdependent and ‘troublesome’ tasks of determining the timing of new airport infrastructure, deciding on or making a case for particular sites or locations and ushering proposed developments through planning processes and any local opposition. In other words, decisions over the need for, and the siting of, additional runways and terminals, came to rest on the predictive capabilities of the practices of forecasting and quantification of future passenger demand.

This chapter explores how the knowledge and expertise of forecasting brought into play complex political processes of data accumulation, calculation and modelling in the realm of aviation and airport expansion. We show how the DfT, in its various guises, constituted a wealth of categories, assumptions, economic models and statistical techniques, which sought to normalise expectations of expansion, putting in place complex assemblages of alternative projections of air travel across the UK and individual airports. Paradoxically, practices of forecasting provided a framework and a stage for core decision-making in the present, while effectively projecting the making and implementation of concrete decisions into a depoliticised space of the future. Along this pathway, the magical currency of numbers and the logics of quantification enabled the DfT to position itself as a ‘centre of power’, which could marginalise all but the most expert and powerful of citizens and groups.

However, despite assembling these statistical and modelling tools, we argue that in the field of airport and aviation expansion provision did not always follow prediction.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates our current obsession with air travel than the rise of scenic ‘joy flights’ for passengers ‘missing the excitement of travel’ during the COVID-19 pandemic (Choat, 2020). Tickets for one such 7-hour round trip from Sydney on Qantas sold out within 10 minutes, making it one of the airline's fastest selling flights ever. Seat prices on the 10 October flight ranged from £607 economy to £2,750 for business class. Employing 787 Dreamliner aircraft normally used for long-haul international flights, Qantas's Great Southern Land flight promised to fly as low as 1,220 metres over New South Wales, the Northern Territory and Queensland, giving passengers the chance to see Australia's most famous landmarks, including Sydney harbour, Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef. A Qantas advert for the trip promised it would ‘reignite the joy of flying’, adding that ‘from the sky, there are no border restrictions’. In its defence, Qantas pleaded that it was not alone in offering its customers ‘flights to nowhere’ as airlines strived to generate business in the midst of global restrictions on air travel. Yet, it is still extraordinary that just months after forest fires devastated Australia, and after scientific studies concluded that global warming ‘boosts’ the hot dry weather likely to cause bush fires by at least 30 per cent, people were still clamouring to take unnecessary pleasure flights (Ghosh, 2020). Ironically, Qantas publicly promoted its commitment to tackling climate change through a ‘simple philosophy: measure, reduce, offset and influence’.

That such flights were over-subscribed epitomises how far the consumption of flying has for many become an integral part of their everyday enjoyment and routines. This was not lost on Qantas, whose chief executive was quick to justify the flights as a response to customer demand, pointing out that ‘so many of our frequent fliers are used to being on a plane every other week and have been telling us they miss the experience of flying as much as the destinations themselves’ (McGregor, 2020). More generally, it is shocking that in some quarters the plane has become an ‘acceptable’ substitute for the coach or train, even for short domestic trips.

The victory of campaigners against the planned Heathrow expansion in the Court of Appeal in February 2020 came almost a month before the UK entered its first lockdown to combat rising COVID-19 infections within its population. The collapse of international travel following the pandemic had severe repercussions across the aviation industry, with unprecedented collapses in passenger numbers, the grounding of airlines and closing of runways, bringing waves of job losses in airlines and airports. In April 2020, scheduled flights in the UK fell by 92.6 per cent compared to the same month in 2019. Airlines were still operating only an estimated 20 per cent of scheduled flights 7 months later in November 2020 (Sun et al, 2021). In June 2020, the House of Commons Transport Committee had already called for targeted measures to support the aviation industry, including 12 months of business rate relief for airlines and airports, and the suspension of APD on flights for 6 months (Transport Committee, 2020: 3– 4).

As passenger numbers in the aviation industry collapsed, the case for additional capacity and the economic arguments in favour of expansion and its financing were at best faltering. Addressing MPs in May 2020, John Holland-Kaye, chief executive of Heathrow Airport, recognised that the impact of the pandemic meant that a new runway may only ‘be needed in 10 to 15 years’ time’ (No Third Runway Coalition, 2020). He later estimated that Heathrow Airport had accumulated losses of some £3 billion during 2020 and the first half of 2021, in part due to the fixed costs of airport operations (Finance Monthly, 2021). Gatwick Airport fared no better, experiencing losses of approximately three-quarters of a billion pounds, as well as cutting its workforce in half. Its chief executive, Stewart Wingate, argued that the financial stability of the airport was not helped by the loss of flights to Heathrow as airlines concentrated their operations at the UK international hub (Transport Committee, 2021a).

This chapter contextualises and analyses the COVID-19 conjuncture, reprising and drawing together the multiple threads of our genealogy of the technologies and techniques that UK governments have used to tackle the problems of aviation expansion and its demands for more and efficient airport capacity.

The New Labour government's ATWP (2003) confidently set out its ambitious plans for airport expansion for the next 30 years. But its delivery was dogged by major setbacks and reversals. For one thing, its vision of the policies and practices of sustainable aviation were discredited by an anti-expansion campaign of local resident groups, scientific and environmental lobbies and direct action environmentalists, as well as institutions internal to the British state, not least the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC). The anti-expansion campaign also voiced its concerns and demands in various arenas, exposing the intensifying contradictions between proposed airport expansions, aviation's rising carbon emissions, and the challenge of climate change. Indeed, by the end of the 2000s, as public awareness of climate change grew stronger, environmental protesters and activists had successfully turned the practice of flying into an emblematic issue in the struggle to tackle climate change. Although the Brown government had given the go-ahead for the building of a third runway at Heathrow in 2009, it was to be the last throw of the dice for a government that had in many ways already lost the argument in favour of expansion. It was no great surprise when the courts blocked proposals for the third runway in 2010, only weeks before the general election (Bowcott et al, 2010).

The arrival in office of a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition after the closely fought 2010 general election made possible a challenge to the embedded expansionist ‘predict and provide’ policies. In opposition, David Cameron, the then leader of the Conservative Party, had grabbed hold of the issue of climate change as part of his efforts to detoxify the party, announcing his ‘no ifs, no buts, no third runway’ slogan to opponents of expansion at Heathrow in 2009 – a pledge that was to haunt his and future governments in the next decade and beyond (Jenkins, 2016). The Coalition’s 2010 Programme for Government duly promised to stop the expansion of airports in South East England, and the subsequent appointment of Justine Greening as Secretary of State for Transport in October 2011 – a vocal opponent of expansion at Heathrow – seemed to confirm the Coalition’s commitment to move away from ‘predict and provide’ policies.

Our genealogies have demonstrated how the UK airports issue and the problem of aviation has evolved into a deepening policy controversy involving the clash of political forces, which espouse competing ideals and values. But they also show the difficulties in challenging the myths and fantasies built into the embedded narratives of sustainable aviation and the technologies of government, which seek to depoliticise and perpetuate aviation expansion, not to mention the highly organised resources of the industry and its supporters. This means that the questioning and problematisation of continued aviation expansion is ever more necessary if we are to meet the pressing demands of the global environmental crisis and the instabilities of living in the Anthropocene. Like Thomas Princen (2005), we thus ask the ‘what if?’ question. What if we were to disinvest from aviation and embark on an alternative agenda of post-growth policies? What would such an imaginary look like? What would such a transformation require? And how would we achieve it?

This chapter addresses these questions by putting forward a manifesto for the green transformation of aviation. We first identify and evaluate the two leading discourses that have emerged – ‘business as usual’ and ‘demand management’ – and which have come to frame public policy dialogue around aviation in the post-pandemic world. We argue that the expansionist logic of ‘business as usual’, which relies on the myth of technological fixes, efficiencies and offsetting, no longer provides the effective tools or policies to tackle the environmental injustices of aviation, if it ever did. But we also conclude that demand management, which offers an alternative to the discourse of continued growth, ultimately conforms to a logic of attenuation, supporting the politics of reform rather than transition and transformation. Reformist politics in our perspective leaves intact existing economic, political and social formations, simply installing one more updated version of the same operating system. Alone, it cannot fully accommodate the radical, non-linear and continual reorganisation of the politics of transition and transformation, which are necessary to bring about changes to our social identities, political institutions and practices of economic and social reproduction, as well as our underlying relations with nature, which can in turn bring about a post-growth, just and sustainable mode of aviation (Eckersley, 2021: 247– 9).

On 16 January 2014, as its founding event, Runways UK convened a major conference on airport expansion in the UK. The event was entitled ‘Airport Infrastructure for a Future Britain’, and it was hosted and moderated by the broadcaster Kirsty Wark. Describing itself as a ‘neutral platform for scheme debate’ (Runways UK, 2014b), the new network was one of a plethora of groups and initiatives that has sought to influence the development of UK aviation policy in recent times. One of its afternoon panels – ‘Achieving Cross-party Agreement and Delivery’ – discussed the ‘delivery of the longterm solution’ required to satisfy the UK's aviation capacity needs. The panellists included Lord Adonis, the former Labour Government Secretary of State for Transport, and Nelson Ogunshakin, the Co-Chair of National Infrastructure Plan Strategic Engagement Forum, which was set up under the Coalition Government. It was not insignificant that the event was chaired by Baroness Valentine, who was then the chief executive of London First, the pro-Heathrow expansion business group campaigning to get the proposed third runway back on the political agenda. In order to frame the discussion, the introductory preamble in the Conference programme explicitly asked its panellists to describe the process of ‘depoliticising’ the ‘eventual scheme’ that would be proposed by the AC. The latter was chaired by Sir Howard Davies, and finally reported on 1 July 2015, following the May general election (Runways UK, 2014a: 7).