Heading interstate or overseas these holidays? Going to catch a flight? This holiday season, airports are bustling with passengers eager for distant beaches, family reunions, and long overdue adventures. But beneath the hum of turbines and the allure of travel lies an uneasy truth: while we are desperate to stop climate change, except in this one, deeply personal way. We will not stop flying. And for all our green intentions, few are willing to trade jet-setting for staycations.
I thought about this — the paradox of flight reflecting humanity’s deeper struggle with limits — while stuck in traffic early one morning, watching balloons hovering gloriously over Melbourne, those serene yet delightfully absurd symbols of our defiance of gravity. I was struck by their improbable grace, while at the same time I’m terrified at the thought of being on board. Because to fly is to conquer nature, to mock its laws, and to tempt its wrath.
Consider Australia’s worst ballooning tragedy: in 1989, two hot air balloons collided near Alice Springs, sending one plummeting 1,000 meters and killing 13 people. Similar ballooning disasters in Texas and Luxor remind us of the precariousness of human conquest over the skies. Yet these tragedies pale next to the toll of modern aviation. In 2019, Australia’s Transport Safety Bureau reported an annual average of 32 fatalities from aviation accidents, a small number compared to road fatalities, but no less tragic.
It’s no wonder we fear it, even as we crave it. It represents both freedom and terror.
Flight has always captivated and petrified us. Our fascination begins in childhood, from dreams of soaring to the playful terror of swings and rides and in the delightful sense of terror as adults hurl us up and around and into the abyss, only to be (hopefully) deposited safely way, way back down on the ground.
We’ve always envied the birds. It’s in our dreams, our mythology, our collective imagination: Icarus and Daedalus, Leonardo da Vinci’s sketches of flying machines. And yet for our long and storied past, actual flight seemed forever elusive.
The first proof of the theoretical possibility of human flight was relativelt recent. It came with Evangelista Torricelli’s invention of the barometer in 1643, which helped establish the aerostatic principle that heavy things could float if weighing less than the equal volume of air. For some of us, perhaps many of us, sitting nervously waiting to board flights on giant metal birds to go on holidays, that seems way too sciency to be reassuring. But Torricelli got the scientific ball rolling, and it was Francesco de Lana, an Italian Jesuit priest, mathematician and naturalist, who proposed harnessing a gas to a conveyance in 1670.
In 1709, another priest, Bartolomeu Lourenco de Gusmao, tried to convince the king of Portugal to fund a giant airship: it evoked a giant covered wagon, with a broad sail that would be filled by a billows and propelled forwards by magnets. Perhaps thankfully for his prospective aeronaut, the craft never flew.
It was several decades later, in 1783, when France’s Montgolfier brothers proved that a fabric bag filled with hot air could fly after an unmanned balloon flew more than two kilometres. The Montgolfiers sent aloft a crew of a sheep, a rooster and a duck (at least the duck had a fair idea what to do). Suitably encouraged, it wasn’t long before the two used the craft to fly nine kilometers, while physicist J.A.C Charles flew for two hours in a hydrogen-filled balloon.
From that point on, aviation lifted off. Australia’s own Lawrence Hargraves lifted five metres in his flying machine (four box kites bound together) in 1894, and those intrepid Yanks Orville and Wilbur Wright eased away from the ground at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in December 1903.
'That very human, impractical quality — the ambition that enables us to defy our limitations — has brought us incredible progress, but it has also left us grappling with existential crises, of which climate change is just one. Whether that ambition helps us find a solution with enough time to preserve the bulk of humans from its impacts remains to be seen. But I wouldn’t be holding my breath.'
Since those early adventures, millions of people have soared safely and prodigiously. Some have also perished, but most have landed safely to go collect their luggage. After all, what is flying if not ‘controlled falling’? We put ourselves at risk to fulfill our wanderlust and to dream, and we will continue to do so. (I would encourage you to dismiss the disturbing reality that the average passenger plane weights 41,000 kilograms, before they put fuel in its tanks, luggage in its bowels and people in its seats.)
Flight’s allure persists because it embodies humanity’s twin impulses: a drive to transcend and a willingness to risk. We learned to soar not by defying gravity, but by mastering it, turning ‘falling with style’ into global infrastructure. Crushing weight and merciless gravity are no longer our masters.
And each step of our journey into the skies reflects humanity’s drive to overcome the impossible. This relentless ambition is arguably lacking in today’s climate discourse. At the COP29 in Azerbaijan, world leaders pledged $300 billion annually to combat climate change. The irony, of course, being the CO2 emissions generated by all the dignitaries and functionaries who flew to attend the chin wag.
As CO2 emissions (including those from planes) worsen the climate crisis, flight is also an indictment of our inability to square progress with planetary stewardship. Here our best intentions are not sufficient to influence our actions. Aspiration and self-indulgence tend to trump survival and idealism, and always have. When it comes to forsaking flight? It’s just not a palatable option for most.
Travel alternatives like returns to wind-powered ships or month-long pilgrimages or carbon-neutral fuels remain tantalizingly out of reach or too inconvenient for a world accustomed to speed. So we press on, flying even as the earth warms beneath us, clinging to the hope that innovation — biofuels, electric planes, or some yet-unseen miracle — will let us have it both ways. Perhaps it will.
Giving up the skies means giving up freedom itself, or so it seems. And yet, the existential price of this freedom is clear. The question, then, is not whether we will continue flying, but whether our ingenuity can mitigate its impact. That very human, impractical quality — the ambition that enables us to defy our limitations — has brought us incredible progress, but it has also left us grappling with existential crises, of which climate change is just one. Whether that ambition helps us find a solution with enough time to preserve the bulk of humans from its impacts remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath.
So, as you board your holiday flight, you might, for a moment, consider this tension. Think about the weight of your journey, not just in pounds or kilograms, but in carbon and consequence. And consider the ambition that lifts us beyond our limits might also be the key to grounding our impact on the planet. Then buckle up, watch the ground fall away, and marvel at the impossibility of it all.
Barry Gittins is a Melbourne writer.