To have ‘slipped the surly bonds of Earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings… and touched the face of God’ is amongst the most ancient dreams of humanity. Never better expressed than in the sonnet of pilot-poet John Gillespie Magee.
Yet inevitably, the green blob has discovered a new target for cancelation: the air show. The magnificent men in their flying machines are being grounded on the altar of net zero.
The most recent cancelation is in Sunderland, which has attracted more than one million visitors each year to see the Red Arrows, the Battle of Britain Memorial flight and aircraft from all over the world.
Council Labour leader Graeme Miller told The Telegraph that if the council and city wanted to get serious about their net-zero commitments, the air show was no longer ‘appropriate.’
‘I can’t think of anything that pumps more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than a bunch of high-performance jets,’ he said, announcing that the air show was to be replaced by a crowd-pleasing triathlon.
Sunderland sadly is not the first such event to be cancelled, and nor will it be the last.
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