Tally Ho!

I don’t fly very much, we usually holiday in the UK and I think it was 2004 the last time we flew anywhere on holiday. The job however does take me up into the air now and again. In the last two years I have flown to New Zealand, Ireland, Inverness, Edinburgh and Leeds!

I have had a few meetings in Leeds or Yorkshire over the last few years and generally depending on how long I am up there and what I am doing I will go by train or drive. For example at this year’s ALT Conference, where I needed to carry a TV studio I took the car, a few months earlier I took the train. However now and again when the diary is quite full and I need to only be in Yorkshire for the day I fly from Bristol Airport. It’s a very quick flight, about 50 minutes and very convenient as there are some excellent bus services from Leeds/Bradford Airport to Leeds and other places in Yorkshire. It means I can be in Leeds for 10am or even earlier and be home before the middle of the night and also means I needn’t stay over.

The route use to be run by Air SouthWest however they recently went out of business and it is now served by Eastern Airways (even if they use the same planes).

Today I was quite surprised to find that there were only two of us on the flight up to Leeds…

I generally don’t feel that bad about my carbon footprint when flying as I don’t fly that often and where possible I will do stuff online or via the phone. Today I feel really bad, as the carbon cost of this flight per person must be so much more than it usually is. I can’t think to imagine how much this must be costing the airline and the loss they are making on this flight. I guess they will still need to fly up to Leeds, as they may be picking up passengers there for their onward flight to Aberdeen and I also guess they need the plane in Aberdeen as the flight from there will be needed.

It should be said that I am getting a very good inflight service and I had a choice of seats, though I did find it funny that even though there were only two of us on the flight, we couldn’t choose where to sit, we had to sit in our allocated seats because of the weight distribution in the aircraft. Just a bit nervous about going to the loo just in case I upset the trim of the plane. The nerves are probably compounded because it’s a plane with propellers and I really don’t feel comfortable flying in a plane with propellers . I don’t know why, it just seems much closer to flying than I feel happy with, I keep thinking I should be wearing goggles and shouting out tally ho!

Wonder how busy the flight home will be?

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