Anyway

In the after­math of the latest round of air travel restric­tions, it seems to me there will be quite a few rami­fic­a­tions for the travel industry, if these restric­tions stay in place for any length of time. Here are some of the ones I see, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

• Full-ser­vice air­lines will have a fight­ing chance again, as long as they actu­ally provide the amen­it­ies that used to be expec­ted for travel, such as food, drink (even if non-alco­hol­ic), pil­lows, blankets, in-flight video sys­tems, and magazines. 
• Flights will be full of tetchy bored people whose elec­tron­ic toys were taken away from them curs­ing the noisy bored chil­dren whose toys were taken away from them.
• Boe­ing’s decision to cre­ate a plane for point-to-point travel rather than hub and spoke looks like the right one. Flights from Heath­row and Gatwick (the big air­ports) were the tar­get points rather than those from smal­ler air­ports; flights from smal­ler air­ports may be used as a way to get mater­i­als onto oth­er flights (if there are no secur­ity checks between land­ing from one flight and get­ting on the next) but are less likely to be tar­gets them­selves. Tak­ing flights from small air­port to small air­port will also avoid the longer secur­ity-check­ing delays at lar­ger airports.
• Secur­ity screen­ing of bags as you get on the plane is likely to start, to enable people to take some cab­in baggage.
• Cheap air­lines which have been try­ing to stop people check­ing lug­gage and only take on hand lug­gage are going to have a hard time.
• Com­pan­ies that sell really good pad­ded bags so you can check your laptop without wor­ries will find a lot of cus­tom­ers. People should also give more thought to secur­ing the data on their laptops when they check them, but most prob­ably won’t both­er. Insur­ance com­pan­ies will have to cope with a lot of claims for lost and dam­aged laptops, iPods, etc.
• The mid-80s fash­ion for see-through briefcases and purses will be rein­vig­or­ated. I had one of these purses, it was actu­ally quite handy being able to find things quickly in it.
• Air tax­is will start to become pop­u­lar as people try to avoid the increas­ing unpleas­ant­ness of com­mer­cial air travel.

It will be inter­est­ing to see how this all plays out, and wheth­er the vari­ous Air Trans­port author­it­ies man­age to come up with real, effect­ive secur­ity meas­ures that don’t incon­veni­ence the inno­cent too much. I’m just glad I don’t need to travel any­where much in the near future.