Air Heads

The UK's four major airlines normally fight like weasels in a sack. Virgin Atlantic ratted out BA to the US authorities over the fixing of fuel surcharges, even though it was doing the same thing itself; the CEOs of Ryanair and BA (Irish Napoleons Michael O'Leary and Willie Walsh) are the kind of people who could start a brawl in a Buddhist monastery; EasyJet is riven with internal feuding and is about to relocate many of its London flights to distant Southend airport in the hope of grabbing a commercial advantage; and so on.

So it was a shock to see the four air heads, the CEOs of these airlines, sharing a podium in London last week. (BBC story, with video of Messrs Walsh and O'Leary pretending they like each other, here). They came together to present a petition to the Government to abolish its Airline Passenger Duty (APD), an admittedly sneaky tax that adds between £24 (for European flights) and £170 (long haul) to the cost of every airline ticket sold.

The airlines blame APD for reducing the number of flights taken in the UK in recent years, and for discouraging foreign visitors from coming to the UK. I'm sure they're right about that. That single tax is obviously much more of a turnoff for flyers than the plethora of add-ons that the airlines themselves tack onto every ticket they sell. Ryanair, for example, charges £40 if you don't print your own boarding pass; even the supposedly full-service BA now tries to bounce you into paying extra to reserve seats in advance; and all the airlines charge extra for paying with debit cards, while offering no real alternative to doing so.

If all that's not enough to put you off, there's the consistently dispiriting experience of the journey itself, whether you're doing the Ryanair rush for the best seats when flying from the glorified bus station known as Luton airport, or waiting for ages for your overnight flight to move onto a gate at spanking new T5 at Heathrow because BA can't get its departing flights away on time. When those things happen to you, it's unlikely that your first instinct will be to curse the APD.

APD is expected to raise £2 billion for the Treasury this year. Environmental campaigners have been quick to point out that this is dwarfed by the estimated £11 billion annual subsidy that the industry receives by virtue of the fact that airline fuel is not subject to the usual array of taxes and duties. And of course, you have to wonder how the four air heads would respond in the highly unlikely event that the government were to listen to their whining and abolish the APD. How much do you think fares would rise, in remarkably short order, if that happened? Best guess: somewhere in the area of £24 (for European flights) to £170 (long haul).