Low-Cost Aviation: Society, Culture and Environment

By Weiqiang Lin and Jean-Baptiste Fretigny

Low-Cost Aviation: Aeromobilities Culture, Politics, and Infrastructures covers critical societal issues such as labor regimes, unequal and changing flying publics, transnational dynamics of migration, tourism, business experiences, environmental challenges and shifting territorialities of LCCs at various scales. It situates LCCs holistically within a societal-infrastructural regime rather than solely within a transport context. The book explores the changing nature of passengers’ profiles and mobile cultures, new consumption patterns and Economic Re-Configurations, as well as geopolitical and sustainability challenges. Providing a research agenda for aeromobilities, the book examines the most pressing social, cultural and political impacts of LCCs on society in different global contexts.It bridges transport and mobility studies, fostering transport sustainability and mobility justice to improve air transport management.

• Offers empirically grounded insights on key social issues and their implications
• Draws on the expertise of an international team of scholars across the social sciences, including geography, urban studies, history and economics
• Utilizes case studies from Asia, America and Europe
• Provides context, theoretical approaches, models and examples showing how they have been implemented

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jun 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780128204313

Weiqiang Lin

Weiqiang Lin, Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His work encompasses air transport social-cultural geographical approaches, affect, materiality, practice, assemblage and critical logistics. He is an editorial board member of Mobilities and Section Editor of Transfers (Ideas in Motion).

Book preview

1: Introduction – Low-cost aviation

society, culture, and environment

Weiqiang Lin ¹ , and Jean-Baptiste Frétigny ²       ¹ Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Kent Ridge, Singapore      ² MRTE Research Unit, CY Cergy Paris Université, Cergy, France

Abstract

Low-cost carriers have dramatically increased their presence in the aviation industry. In this introductory chapter, we argue that the low-cost carriers (LCCs) model should not be seen as simply enabling a new way of running airlines, but also as a new mode of travel that actively feeds the (re)making and (re)organization of contemporary life—both in the air and on the ground. Flying on the cheap has far-reaching impacts on social practices, cultural identities, and environmental responses. This volume delves into the intricate reasons and bases on which LCCs have come to be so popular and integral to people's modern mobilities. The chapter thus calls for greater sensitivity to the emergent modalities of low-cost aeromobilities that have both democratized and splintered the way people move and become global citizens. It delineates how the various chapters of this volume work to unpack the profound shifts that flying on the cheap is heralding.

Keywords

Aeromobilities; Climate change; Flying on the cheap; Identities; Low-cost carriers'growth; Migrations; Modes of living/flying; Social relationships; Tourism; Travel cultures

Ever since the advent of popular commercial flying after the Second World War, airlines have been experimenting with new ways to offer cheaper fares to passengers, in bids to capture larger shares of the air travel market. What we know of today as low-cost carriers (LCCs) have been instrumental to driving this trend in modern times—an idea first sparked by the first acclaimed discount carrier, Pacific Southwest Airline, which in 1949 offered low-cost intrastate fares in California; and, later on, Southwest Airlines, which remains today the world's largest low-cost airline since its debut in 1971 (Gross and Schröder, 2007; Vowles and Lück, 2013). Beginning in the United States, this model of cost downsizing, and thus the ability to pass on savings to passengers, has spread to virtually every corner of the globe today, with Asia Pacific and Europe now seeing particular success with their large international low-cost outfits, such as Air Asia, Jetstar, easyJet and Ryanair (Jiang, 2013; Poon and Warring, 2010; Strategic Direction, 2006). Indeed, flying on the cheap has become a theme-tune of the airline business, even affecting the pricing strategies of legacy carriers.

It is not difficult to see how entrenched such a trend is in the aviation industry. From 2011 to 2020, LCCs have dramatically increased their presence in the air travel market, rising from a capacity share of 22.8% at the start of the decade, to 35% in 2020 (CAPA, 2017, 2020). In terms of passenger numbers, the International Civil Aviation Organization (2016) reports that LCCs carried 984 million passengers in 2015, which was 28 per cent of the world total scheduled passengers, marking a 10 per cent increase compared to 2014, or a passenger growth rate that was about one and a half times the rate of the world total average passenger growth. This blistering pace of expansion has been abetted by the erasure of various entry barriers, including regulations on air rights, air services, and ownership in nascent markets (Burghouwt and de Wit, 2015; Zhang et al., 2008). While aviation used to be the preserve of a select few flag carriers and monopolistic air transport services (Sampson, 1984), recent liberalization of the air travel market has augured greater international competition and opportunities for LCC to thrive.

Clearly, the low-cost aviation model is here to stay. Even though the COVID-19 global pandemic has crimped business for airlines as a whole, LCCs have seen encouraging signs of rebound since the reopening of borders in 2021 (Partridge, 2021). These observations have provided important insights on the trajectories and futures of the aviation industry, including glimpses of how LCCs might continue to soar postpandemic—particularly given their strengths in cost control and quick aircraft turnarounds (Czerny et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2021). Yet, by focusing on the hard facts of the business, a preponderance of existing research has also tended to yield only a limited range of perspectives on the subject—namely those tied to the operations of the LCC model, and its impacts on air transport networks. While useful for informing business decisions, these perspectives arguably offer little understanding on how LCCs may be simultaneously entangled with a series of social, cultural, and human-environmental tendencies that make them difficult to undo. Put alternatively, the LCC model should not be seen as simply enabling a new way of running airlines, but as a new mode of travel that actively feeds the (re)making and (re)organization of contemporary life.

This book is exactly interested in how this (re)fashioning of life has been taking place under the ambit of LCCs. In particular, it is curious about the way flying on the cheap has had far-reaching impacts on social practices, cultural identities, and environmental responses. Echoing Adey et al.'s (2007: 774) view on aeromobilities in general, the book is equally concerned with a socially and culturally-inflected interpretation of air transportation—and flying as an unavoidable endeavor in delight and despair—but more specifically in the context of LCCs. In many ways, the LCC model, as a subset in aviation, has indeed been a testing ground for a variety of new phenomena and modes of living. From the way it has made possible the idea of weekend getaways, of yearly holidays for a fraction of the population, of transnational migration, of student mobilities, and of long-distance commuting (see, for example, Dobruszkes et al., 2017; Dorow et al., 2017; Lindquist, 2018), LCCs in fact do not just play the role of a form of transport. Rather, the advent of LCCs has, to a considerable degree, rewoven the fabric of everyday life in its ability to assemble dispersed social networks (Larsen et al., 2007: 255) cost-efficiently. In this book, the contributors are keen to unpack the profound shifts that flying on the cheap is heralding, both across regions, and increasingly across the globe.

Low-cost aviation: observations and general directions

Before proceeding further with this argument, we would like to take stock on the extant scholarship on low-cost aviation. Indeed, LCCs are not a new phenomenon; neither are we suggesting that the literature is thin on this subject. On the contrary, discussion on LCCs, as well as their impacts on aviation networks and economic means of connection, is rife in fields such as geography, air transport management, tourism, and hospitality. For demonstration, as of September 2021, a search on low-cost carrier in the Journal of Transport Geography yields a total of 385 hits since 1997; while a similar search in the Journal of Air Transport Management returns almost a thousand (978) articles. This research offers an invaluable genealogy of the rapid growth of low-cost aviation, especially since the 1990s. In particular, it charts the important role that air liberalization has played in introducing unprecedented freedoms in the establishment of new airlines, joint ventures, and business partnerships (Dobruszkes, 2009; Hanaoka et al., 2014; Tan, 2015).

A corollary part of this discussion is an attention to the changing geographies of air transport nodes and networks due to enhanced LCC activity in recent history. One recurrent theme pertains to the (re)emergence of secondary and regional airports—from London Luton to Don Muang, Bangkok—that have become important anchors for these cost-conscious airlines (Barbot, 2006; Dobruszkes, 2006; Hirsh, 2016). Often located some distance away from large cities, secondary and regional airports are said to offer cheaper and less congested options for LCCs to operate out of (Francis et al., 2003; Graham, 2013). As the airport industry began privatizing at the turn of the century, this effect has only further intensified, as airports compete for business among airlines based on cost. However, some scholars have also noted LCCs' recent return to main hubs as part of their continued expansion, and how they pose a threat to traditional carriers that typically operate from these bases (Dobruszkes et al., 2017). Even though low-cost aviation once generated parallel systems of flows predicated on secondary and regional airports, this separation is, in other words, gradually narrowing, as LCCs encroach into the space of primary nodes.

Another spatial pattern identified by LCC research concerns the development of new tourist destinations previously underserved by legacy carriers. Once considered nonviable due to a dearth of business travelers, some of these destinations (and their respective airports) have become hugely successful air travel nodes, thanks to LCCs' ability to lower overheads and cater products specifically to leisure travelers (Farmaki and Papatheodorou, 2015; Whyte and Prideaux, 2008). Commentators have noted how this phenomenon is stoking tendencies toward unsustainable mass tourism at these places (Aramberri, 2019; Milano et al., 2019), while at the same time risking economic disruption whenever LCC routes are dismantled after a season (Prideaux and Whyte, 2014). In the face of such a lack of loyalty, low-cost aviation thus positively enables route maps that connect towns and cities that were formerly isolated (such as the Azores or Northern Norway) but also promotes greater instability in air travel networks as these get ephemerally established and unraveled over time.

Other authors have emphasized the business characteristics of LCCs, delineating the types of clientele they serve as well as the conditions surrounding their use. While some scholars flip the question of loyalty around to interrogate whether passengers consistently patronize particular LCC brands (Akamavi et al., 2015; Forgas et al., 2010; Han et al., 2014), others have considered customers' behaviors with respect to airline choice: be it their purchasing practices (Escobar-Rodríguez and Carvajal-Trujillo, 2014), their in-flight service preferences (Han, 2013), or their engagement with social media advertisements put up by LCCs (Bigne et al., 2018). While these are important consumer traits, LCCs' uptake is still ultimately tied to the specific economics of air services and their intermodal possibilities. At times, these low-cost options can compete with, or are outcompeted by, other modes of transport with a similar speed and range profile, such as high-speed rail (Clewlow et al., 2014). But, at other times, they can also be combined with complementary modes of transport, including car or rail (Albalate et al., 2015; Borhan et al., 2017), to fulfill expectations for the most economical means of travel. This suggests that the terms of use of LCCs are not straightforward or confined to the universe of air transport; rather, they can easily spill into other realms and manners of movement.

Notwithstanding the economic promise of LCCs, flying with cheap fares does not preclude other costs, notably environmental ones. A major drawback scholars have recently begun to cite more and more often with respect to the growth of LCCs is air travel's worsening carbon footprint. Although currently accounting for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the rate at which the industry has picked up speed since the 1990s—in large part due to LCCs as well as the opening up of the Global South (Bowen, 2013)—raises serious concerns about the aggravation of climate change by the aviation sector. Some scholars have called attention to the intrinsic irreconcilability between LCCs' growth—sustained by more frequent travels as well as the widening of airborne publics often referred to as a democratization of air transport—and the need for societies to rein in these climate change impacts (Gössling et al., 2019; Graham and Shaw, 2008). Citing further issues within the LCC model such as the continued favoring of the already-flying and affluent travelers over working classes (Casey, 2010; Cwerner, 2009), these studies have shed critical light on the fact that all is definitely not rosy with this increasingly popular mode of cheap transport.

Taken together, existing research on low-cost aviation has provided a broad understanding of the manifold drivers behind low-cost aviation's development, its business characteristics, its geographical patterns, and its environmental impacts. Indeed, over twodecades of scholarship on the subject have acquainted researchers with a new type of air transport that has changed (and challenged) the calculus of flying in contrast to the early years. While this model may currently be disrupted by the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic, LCCs are expected to survive the crisis and continue growing into the future (see, for instance, Soelasih, 2020). Yet, at the same time, there are also, inevitably, already some hard questions being asked about the manner in which high-density LCCs would be returning as in the postpandemic world (Gössling, 2020; Macilree and Duval, 2020). For a peer into the future, this volume aims to delve deeper into (and look back on) the finer reasonings and bases on which LCCs have come to be so popular and integral to people's modern mobilities. Rather than rehashing yesteryears' spatial networks and nodes, contributions in this book will investigate the underlying currents and desires that caused populations to yearn to take to the skies, cheaply.

The social and cultural dynamics of flying on the cheap

Grasping the intricacies in the rise of LCCs requires a close attunement to the social, cultural, and political motivations lying behind the sector's business economics. To be sure, we do not claim to be the first to make such a proposition, but research in this vein remains comparatively thin at the moment, although growing. Turning to these subtler, noneconomic dimensions of LCC operations and infrastructures is in fact acutely relevant to today's mobility-hungry world and can shed light on how flying on the cheap is not only a matter of air transport, but one of a quality of life. This echoes Adey's (2010: 9) concept of aerial life, which he defines as the kind of life our aerial world has produced, or a state of being that is supported, shunted and made good by the aeroplane. By paying heed to these softer aspects of (low-cost) aviation, this book seeks to offer a nuanced perspective on how this form of flying has become buoyant in recent decades, and why it is significant for our