Calibrating Consumption: Flyers’ Dilemmas in the Age of the Low-Cost Carrier

The low-cost carrier (LCC) model of flying has led to a significant reorganization of daily life over the past few decades. Business travelers and students for instance have noted that the efficient nature of LCCs help facilitate their increasingly mobile lives—from transnational employment to gap year travel, to maintaining cross-border relationships or family lives. However, awareness of the serious effects of carbon emissions from the aviation industry and the subsequent emergence of the flight shame movement have led to growing tensions between maintaining current livelihood practices and the wider environmental impacts of flying on the cheap. Some flyers are beginning to face this “flyers' dilemma” and find themselves at a turning point in their relationship with sustainability. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter explores how people who fly frequently with a European-based LCC attempt to deal with this dilemma. We argue that the specific characteristics and experiences of frequent short-haul LCC flying enable individuals to balance their mobility choices not apart from, but directly alongside other seemingly unrelated forms of consumption such as vegetarianism. Mobility consumption is therefore based more on social decisions than on individual behavioral decisions.