It's difficult sometimes not to feel just a little bit paranoid when you work in domestic and regional aviation in the UK... The London-centric media doesn't seem to care about what happens outside the M25. The Government clobbers our poor passengers for air passenger duty both ways on their domestic flying. Fuel remains stubbornly high and landing charges at certain airports seem to be designed purely to prevent smaller, high-frequency regional aircraft from serving their pristine tarmac. And then, of course, there's the prospect of high speed rail '...progressively replacing short-haul flights'. Successive governments (the above quote was one of many excitable statements about HS2 from the last Labour Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis) have pinned their colours firmly to the rail tracks as the silver bullet that will mean their constituents will be spared the horror of taking to the skies.
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