There is a peculiar hubris in the air, and it smells faintly of aviation fuel and desperation. British Airways, that once-proud flag carrier now more familiar with delays than dignity, has announced tests for ultra-long-haul jets. The goal?
To keep the United Kingdom a global hub by connecting us directly to destinations like Sydney, Perth, and Buenos Aires in flights lasting up to twenty hours. Twenty hours. That is not a journey.
That is a sentence. A sentence to be served in a glorified aluminium tube, breathing recirculated air and eating what the airline optimistically calls 'meals'. Let us pause to savour the sheer, breathtaking ambition of this idea.
It is pure, uncut Victorian-era thinking. The same mentality that sent explorers into the heart of darkness with a pith helmet and a bottle of quinine now sends modern pilgrims to the Antipodes in economy class. But is this a bold reassertion of British connectivity, or a masochistic folly born of a post-Brexit identity crisis?
The answer, I suspect, is both. Consider the historical parallel. In the late 19th century, the British Empire knit itself together with steamships and telegraph cables.
The journey from London to Bombay took weeks, but it was a necessary evil for the maintenance of imperial authority. Today, the imperative is economic, not imperial, but the logic is eerily similar: if London is to remain a global city, it must be within striking distance of every major market on Earth. The aeroplane is the new steamer, and the skies are our new Suez Canal.
Yet there is a decadence to this project that should give us pause. We are not a nation of explorers any more. We are a nation of commuters.
The ultra-long-haul flight is the ultimate expression of a culture that has forgotten how to wait, how to endure, how to savour the interval between departures. We demand instantaneous connection, even at the cost of our own biological rhythms. I recall the Roman Empire in its dotage, when the aristocracy would dine on flamingo tongues and force themselves to vomit to eat more.
We do not vomit. We simply strap ourselves into a seat for a full day, numb our senses with in-flight entertainment, and pretend that we have conquered distance. In truth, the distance has conquered us.
It is not merely the physiological assault of twenty hours in a pressurised cabin that concerns me. It is the psychological surrender. To fly such a route is to exist in a permanent state of suspended animation, a kind of airborne purgatory where time loses meaning.
We are no longer travellers; we are cargo. The debate about the viability of these flights often revolves around fuel efficiency and jet lag. But the deeper question is one of national identity.
Does the UK truly need a direct flight to Perth to remain a hub? Or is this a desperate lurch towards relevance in a world where geography is increasingly irrelevant, and where the very concept of a 'hub' is being eroded by point-to-point travel and the rise of rivals in the Gulf? I suspect the latter.
The Gulf carriers, with their bottomless oil wealth and luxurious cabins, have already colonised the skies. British Airways, by contrast, tries to compete by simply going further, longer, harder. It is the response of a fading power that mistakes endurance for strength.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not against ambitious engineering. The aircraft required for these routes are marvels of modern technology.
But they are also symbols of a culture that has lost its sense of proportion. We once built cathedrals that took centuries to complete. Now we build planes that take us to the other side of the world in less than a day.
And we think this is progress. It is, in fact, a form of madness: the madness of acceleration for its own sake. The 20-hour flight will come.
Business travellers will take it, because they have no choice. But let us not pretend it is a triumph. It is a concession.
A concession to our own impatience, our own unwillingness to accept that some distances are simply too great to be bridged without cost. The Romans built roads. We build runways.
Both will one day be ruins. And perhaps, when the archaeologists of the future dig up the wreckage of an Airbus A350, they will marvel at our ambition, but they will also pity our exhaustion.
