The road to Britain's newest airport, Robin Hood International, a few miles outside Doncaster in south Yorkshire, has a single dusty lane in each direction. Farms and hedgerows judder past your car windows, cow parsley almost brushes your wing mirrors, and then around a sharp corner a great black lake of parking appears, and beyond it a long, silvery shed of glass and pale metal.
The first flight from Robin Hood, to Palma in Majorca, was 10 weeks ago. But inside the bright clean terminal the builders are still hammering. David Ryall, the airport's managing director, briskly drains the largest cappuccino available at the new terminal cafe and talks over the din with practised confidence. "The hundred thousandth passenger went through here a week back," he says. "We reckon we'll go through a million in a year." In "three to five years", he goes on, that annual total should double. "And after that we've got our 2030 masterplan. We see an airport certainly in excess of ten million passengers per annum."
To cope with this growth, the terminal has some ingenious features. Without closing to passengers, its end walls can be quickly taken down and new sections added. Great windswept spaces deliberately left empty to the north and south of the terminal can be built on. And some of the airport's service buildings can be picked up and moved wholesale to make more room when these spaces run out. Yet the innovation that makes Ryall proudest is the arrangement of the check-in desks. Their numbers run from right to left, rather than the usual left to right. "Can you guess why?" Ryall asks, trying to hold back a smile. He pauses for an answer but not for very long. "So when we take the end wall down we can add more without changing the numbering."
Over the past half century, and especially over the past decade, such assumptions about the future of British air travel have come to seem more and more rational. In 1970, British airports were used by 32 million people. In 2004, the figure was 216 million. In 2030, according to the government's most recent forecast, the figure will be between 400 million and 600 million - which some authorities think may be too cautious. "In the last 30 years," says Stephen Hardwick, director of public affairs for the British Airports Authority (BAA), "all the government predictions of growth have been underestimates."
Britain has some of the world's fullest passenger aircraft, some of the densest concentrations of airports and air traffic, and probably the greatest national "propensity to fly" - aviation industry jargon for the average number of flights taken per person - of any comparable rich country (and rich countries fly more than other ones). Some of the environmental consequences of this prolonged air travel boom have been visible and audible in Britain for decades; others are only beginning to be fully understood, and feared. But what has been examined least is why the British fly so much, and whether this is likely to continue.
At the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, which was founded to promote air travel 37 years before the Wright Brothers made the first successful powered flight in 1903, there is a slightly stuffy top-floor library crammed with good books about planes and airports and famous pilots. Yet there is only one volume about passengers. Air Travel: A Social History by Kenneth Hudson, first published in 1972, quite early in the modern air boom, records that organised passenger flight began in Germany in the years before the first world war. But the Germans used airships; the first paying passenger to use a plane was British. On July 14 1919, Mr W H Pilkington, of the famous St Helens glassmaking firm, telephoned Airco, an embryonic British airline, and said he had a meeting in Paris the next day and had missed the boat train. Early the next morning, he travelled to an RAF base at Hounslow Heath, west of London, which was the only airfield with customs facilities, paid £50 - a sign of things to come in business fares - and set off for France in the open cockpit of a converted light bomber. "Low clouds and rain the whole way," the pilot recorded in his log. But they made it to Paris; the next day Pilkington flew back to London, announced that he was delighted with the experience, and became a well-connected advocate for air travel.
Until the second world war, civilian flying in Britain and elsewhere remained something for important people. Air fares were high, aircraft were slim, airport lounges had armchairs not seats in rows. "The nearer conditions in an aeroplane approached those of a good London club," writes Hudson, "the more contented [British passengers] were likely to be."
But air travel was a significant advance for a country with the world's biggest and most scattered empire. Senior imperial personnel and their families - children could now fly to and from boarding school in Britain - started using a new global network of routes and landing facilities. In 1928, the first purpose-built passenger terminal in the world was erected at Croydon aerodrome. In 1936, Gatwick opened, the first airport with its own train station. The notion of mass air travel was beginning to crystallise in Britain.
That there was a mass appetite had been evident since the end of the first world war, when a craze for "joy-riding" in planes - paying to be flown for a few minutes over an improvised airfield - swept through British coastal resorts. In Blackpool in the summer of 1919, the Illustrated London News reported, there was a constant queue of working-class holidaymakers waiting to be taken up in tiny biplanes: "As the machines continued to operate ... [and] actually flew regularly on a daily service between Blackpool and Manchester, people began to realise that flying was nothing like as dangerous as they thought. There was just a sufficient spice ... to make people brag. Consequently, today flying is rapidly becoming one of the most popular pastimes of Lancashire, and, of course, everyone knows the proverb: 'What Lancashire thinks today, England thinks tomorrow.'"
The second world war brought bigger aircraft, the first jet engines, and greater flying ranges. It made planes seem central to modern life, and gave millions of Britons their first taste of abroad. It set in motion political and social changes that gave those millions considerably more disposable income. And it left many airlines, their activities and assumptions hugely disrupted by the conflict, close to going bankrupt. To survive, they needed a new sort of customer.
Before the first world war, the Italian futurist thinker Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had predicted that planes would give people richer and effectively longer lives by changing the meaning of distance and time. Now, in the postwar era, with the average British working week shortening, paid holidays lengthening, and the economy relatively buoyant, Marinetti's airy promise began to become an everyday consumer assumption.
The modern package holiday was one consequence. In the 30s, Russian expatriates had started a rudimentary holiday camp at Calvi in Corsica. In the late 40s one of the Russians, Vladimir Raitz, now studying in London, realised that British holidaymakers, who were falling out of love with their own resorts and in love with the Mediterranean faster than perhaps any other nationality, would make ideal customers - but only if they could get to Corsica and back quickly enough to make a fortnight's holiday worthwhile. Raitz adopted the British travel pioneer Thomas Cook's 19th-century idea of selling transport and accommodation as a single item, updated it for the air age and called his company Horizon Holidays. In 1950, the first 300 Horizon customers flew to Corsica.
Given that Britons lived in a small country with a big population and an unspectacular climate, isolated by water but also close to some of the world's most alluring destinations, it was not surprising they rapidly took to air travel. But it became apparent in Britain equally quickly that this new appetite had some uncomfortable implications. Britons liked going to other countries more than foreigners liked visiting them: from the 50s, a deficit, anxiously noted by government and the press, opened and rapidly widened between the income Britain received from foreign visitors and the amount Britons spent abroad. By 1983, the Office for National Statistics records, the ratio was two to one against Britain; by 2003, it was three to one.
British disquiet about flying and the environment also began early. In the 40s, proposals to expand the newly-opened Heathrow by flattening nearby villages led to the country's first anti-airport groups. By the 60s, any airport scheme attracted ferocious opposition. But these protesters did not yet challenge air travel in general: "You wanted to get the airport away from your place and on to someone else's," says Brendon Sewill, an anti-airport campaigner then and now.
By 1970, pollution and climate change were acknowledged political issues. Yet even the prophetic, sometimes apocalyptic green magazine the Ecologist had to acknowledge the lack of scientific understanding at the time about aircraft emissions: "The consequences are unclear." Since the other reasons for objecting to the growth in flying were either local - plane noise and airport sprawl - or slightly abstract - the homogenisation of the world by mass tourism - a successful national movement against air travel did not form.
Instead, the oil crisis of 1973 and the deep recession that followed halted and reversed the boom. "Growth in air travel goes hand in hand with growth in gross domestic product," says Hardwick. In 1974, the incoming Labour government cancelled a Conservative scheme for a huge new airport off the Essex coast, arguing in part that there would not be sufficient demand. Yet the following year, aviation growth resumed. By the late 70s, there was such hunger for Freddie Laker's cheap transatlantic plane tickets that what the Times called "Lakerville", an encampment of would-be customers with sleeping bags and "We Love You Freddie" placards, built up outside the Skytrain offices in London.
Nowadays, the workings of the British aviation market are a bit more complicated. The internet, the generation of low-cost airlines that came after Laker, the ever-widening range of possible destinations - all have made air travel seem in tune with our free-spending times. "The instant choice that you make, to go skiing or to Peru, is consumerism in its purest form," says the novelist and airport enthusiast JG Ballard.
In other ways, too, flying fits with modern Britain. The use of most forms of transport is increasing as people commute further and have more mobile lives. A multicultural society means flights to see relations and friends abroad. More and more people own foreign properties, and want to visit them quickly and often. More and more prestige is attached to the exotic: "People have enough stuff," says Tamar Kasriel of the social forecasters the Henley Centre, "They want experiences."
Going travelling before university has changed from an adventurous minority pursuit to something approaching an entitlement. The first Lonely Planet guidebook, Across Asia On The Cheap, was published in 1974, when the hippy trail leading east from Europe was a few years old, involved disintegrating vans as much as jet travel, and was unmapped by such books. Nowadays there are cheap and flexible round-the-world air tickets and guides to everywhere. Dreams of crossing continents come mass-manufactured.
Meanwhile, the falling cost of air travel in general, and the industry's relentless publicising of that fact, has a practical and, increasingly, psychological appeal. "For affluent people discount is increasingly acceptable," says Kasriel. "It shows you're savvy." Sarah Miller, editor of the upmarket Condé Nast Traveller magazine, agrees: "I know people who will travel halfway round the country to get 20p off a pot of basil. The generation brought up by parents who went through the war have an insatiable desire for bargain hunting."
Ryanair and the others, moreover, have been offering their miraculous-sounding deals at a time when other forms of British transport have been becoming more expensive, and seemingly more difficult to use. Tellingly, even the unusually-admired passenger trains using the Channel Tunnel have failed to achieve their predicted customer totals at the same time as the airlines have been exceeding theirs.
The nature of the modern British economy also promotes flying. In recent years, the strength of the pound has made foreign travel cheaper. The growing consumer demand for imported goods - itself partly stimulated by foreign travel - has helped British air freight double over the past 10 years. The biggest air freight category, much of it flown in over the former market gardens buried beneath the runways of Heathrow, is fruit and vegetables.
The world of globalised business, particularly in Britain, with its dominant centuries-old concern with foreign trade, is increasingly one of meetings abroad and international courier deliveries; of travel-addicted consultants and manufacturing components delivered at the last minute. "Business travel seems to grow throughout the economic cycle," says Richard Reeves, director of the business consultancy Intelligence Agency. "If a recession comes people will just fly economy class or no-frills."
The air of social inevitability given to flying by all these trends is a powerful thing. The travel industry has long been good at making flying seem universal and inescapable. But in fact it is not yet either. In 2003, 96% of the passengers who used Heathrow were from the better-off socioeconomic categories A, B and C1. Nationally, households in the poorer C2, D and E categories take five times fewer flights on average. "A significant proportion of people never fly," says Tony Grayling of the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Even the modern low-cost airlines, according to a recent IPPR report, rely heavily on prosperous people flying more: ABC1 customers buy more than three quarters of the tickets.
Yet those excluded from the air travel boom, like opponents of specific airport schemes, are not a powerful enough interest group, for the time being at least, to challenge fundamentally the airborne lifestyles of the majority. Only the issue of aircraft emissions seems to hold that possibility. Environmentalists finally began to raise the topic with confidence in the early 90s, when the scientific evidence hardened, and when anti-airport groups realised that universal arguments and combined campaigns might be more effective than nimbyism. It has taken a further dozen years for aircraft emissions to become a matter for mainstream debate. And green groups concede that the debate is at an early stage. Kasriel is more cautious still: "People are in a state of half-knowing about the costs of air travel. It's like cars: people think, 'There are too many, people should use them less. Except me.'"
It is revealing that the way of dealing with aircraft emissions favoured by the British government, by most airlines, and even many environmental groups, is "emissions trading": effectively allowing the aviation industry to carry on growing - and polluting - in return for paying other industries to reduce their emissions. "That's not addressing the central issue," says Tim Johnson, director of the long-established green pressure group the Aviation Environment Federation. "It does not mean people flying less."
Perhaps nothing can realistically be done to break the British flying habit. Besides, with poorer but much more populous countries developing flying habits of their own - India is rapidly setting up low-cost airlines - air travel by Britons may end up as a minor environmental problem by comparison. At Robin Hood airport, with its huge tombstone-grey sweep of runway, originally laid for long-distance RAF bombers to carry nuclear weapons, they are already anticipating passenger flights from China.
In this context, the hopes of Johnson and other environmentalists that air travel will ultimately be restricted by heavy taxes on air tickets and strict government limits on individual airlines' total emissions can sound optimistic. But optimistic assumptions are not held solely by those who want to tame aviation. "The big question hanging over air travel is the price of oil," says Miller. Oil already costs nearly 40% more than it did six months ago. Some airlines have begun to raise their fares to compensate. Yet all the forecasts about the continuing growth of air travel are based on the price of plane tickets continuing to fall.
Robin Hood airport is an hour and a half's drive, or less, from Nottingham East Midlands airport, Sheffield City airport, Leeds-Bradford and Manchester airports and Humberside International. One day, the long glassy terminal at Robin Hood International may have to be altered in a way not currently anticipated: not made bigger but smaller.
