The heavy price for quiet skies above
Something unusual happened the other day. A plane flew overhead. A big one, a commercial passenger jet of some kind. It was a clear afternoon in Toronto and we could see it clearly. Everyone in the park stopped to look as it climbed and headed off toward the northeast.
History books tell us of the shock people felt when confronted with new technologies for the first time. Automobiles. Heavier-than-air flight. Electricity. Steam locomotives. In more modern times, I clearly remember the day I first tried that newfangled internet thing. It seemed magical.
Humans are adaptable. What is wondrous and intimidating at first becomes mundane in short order. But the pandemic has shown us that the reverse is also true: what was once routine can become astonishing again after being gone for only a few short months.
Not gone entirely, of course. Even in the worst days of the pandemic, some flights continued in and out of Toronto. Though Q2 data is not yet available, the Greater Toronto Transit Authority told me by email that their Q1 numbers showed a 17 and 16 per cent drop in international and domestic passengers respectively from the year before — a pretty big swing considering it was only in mid- to- late March that the pandemic really hit here.
That’s a lot of empty seats and grounded planes.
One can only imagine what the Q2 numbers will show when they’re released next week. Actually, one doesn’t need to imagine. If you live anywhere near a big city with a major airport, just go outside and look up for a minute or two and you’ll see what I mean.
This will be more obvious in some places than others, of course. Before the pandemic, my neighbourhood was directly on a flight path for planes coming in and out of Pearson. The local neighbourhood property association — a group of citizens that are particularly, ahem, engaged — was even agitating to change the approach corridors to get rid of the noisy jets. ( This is not a joke. They really went NIMBY over planes overhead.)
It’s not an issue today, it hardly needs to be said. The once- constant roar of engines above is basically gone.
A jet roaring by captures interest as people crane their necks to look for it. Traffic noise is way down, too. Only construction noise mars the peace. That never really stopped.
The relative silence is nice, to be honest. One can roll their eyes at a NIMBY while agreeing about how irritating some parts of modern life can be. The silence in Toronto really is lovely. It’s a novelty to be in a city so big and also so quiet. It would be something to celebrate if it hadn’t come at such a cost in lives and economic pain. But quieter streets and emptier skies have undeniably made the city a nicer place to be.
How long will it stay this way? That’s not a rhetorical question. Anyone who knows the answer is set to make millions timing the market. How long business and recreational travel will be flattened is a big, as- yet- unanswerable question. Much like how commercial real estate is a gigantic question mark while companies and individuals ponder the future of offices, international air travel for business is equally in doubt.
And vacations? We’re barely able to drive around within our own country. Flying to another one seems like sci- fi right now. We had been thinking of taking a trip to the United Kingdom next summer before all this began. Even that seems like an aspirational goal at this point — it may be possible, but only if a lot of things go right.
This brought to mind some vague and hazy memories from very early in my life. When I was five or so, my grandparents hosted a family reunion in Toronto for my grandfather’s numerous brothers and sisters. They’d grown up in the U. K. but dispersed all over the world after the Second World War in search of better lives and opportunities in areas that weren’t quite so bombed out.
When they left in the midto- late 1940s, none of them really had any expectation of ever seeing home again, or seeing each other. Indeed, that was true of my grandfather and his father — they stayed in touch with letters but never saw each other again. For working- class folks like my papa, the Atlantic Ocean was an obstacle to be crossed once. Once he was set up in Canada, he didn’t plan to ever leave.
But over the next four decades, something remarkable happened. His working-class job morphed into a comfortable management position at IBM. His brothers and sisters did comparably well in the post-war world. Air travel first became common, and then it became cheap.
And in the mid-’80s, these far- flung farm kids, now well- off adults entering retirement, realized they could all gather in one place for a gigantic party. So they did. And they did it a few more times after that, and they also went back to the old farm in the U. K. Because they could. Air travel was cheap, convenient and easy.
Right now, if I really had to, I could get back to that farm. Leaving Toronto, and after making a few stops, I’d be out of pocket a couple grand. Doable, if pricey. The real hassle would be the four weeks I’d have to spend in quarantine — two to get into the U. K. and two once I was back home.
In some urgent circumstances, maybe a trip is worth the price, in time and money. This is true for the relatively affluent, who travel for fun, as much as it is the less- wealthy, who save up so they can visit family all over the world. Realistically, though, who’s going to bother until things get much, much better?
They probably will get better. We won’t soon forget the ease and convenience of travel by air. But it’s going to take years to come back and may never be quite the same. That’s sad, in a way. The quiet skies above make reading in the yard a lot more pleasant. But only until you think about how fast your world got smaller.
it’s going to take years to come back and may never be
quite the same.