Yep, and it made the planet warmer so not all gain on reduced carbon.
It was beautiful though, so much quieter and gorgeous blue skies - had never realised how the planes created overcast conditions.
One thing you have to remember, the amount of water vapour over our skies is increased due to our position in the North Atlantic. Most of the daily set entry points for the trans-Atlantic routes from European, Middle Eastern & Asian departure flights lie off the cost of our isles (including Ireland). So we get a lot of non-UK traffic in our skies, but is not necessarily representative of how all the Earth's skies look.
However, the kind of markets that companies like Flybe serve may well be better served by high speed networks rather than by flying. And this is where we should be, but are not investing in. Connectivity by public transport is going to be a vital part of how we go forward in making ourselves more energy efficient. More than 80% of UK kilometres travelled in 2017 where not using public transport, this cannot go on, we need the infrastructure to take a significant proportion of that 80% off the roads and onto public transport.
The problem is in this country is that urban / suburban planning is the wrong way around. First we build houses, then we release that there is no infrastructure to effectively service them (they are always talked about in planning stages, but often get finally overlooked). It should be the other way, planning should be purely on the basis that the infrastructure is in place, i.e. effective public transport, retail facilities, schools, medical services etc. But moreover how we build is going to have to change. Whilst many people's aspirations may be that lovely detached 4-5 bedroom house on the edge of suburbia, in reality we need to make better use of brown field spaces closer into urban areas. This may well mean much shared housing areas, albeit with the hindsight of more effective insulating / soundproofing methods to afford people's privacy.
We need to do this because we need to make better use of our green spaces, not only for more farming but also for carbon fixing. So the steady march of UK housing further into the countryside will not only need to be curtailed, but eventually scaled back. But we will only be able to do that with the right public transport infrastructure in place first, in other words we need to start building additional capacity now, not wait until existing capacity is overwhelmed. The government is making all the right noises about this, but living as I do in a river valley that is seeing a lot of new developments going up, as well as a lot of jobs soon to move down the valley into Leeds in the next couple of years, the actual capacity growth doesn't seem to be matching the housing growth. So I remain deeply cynical that they will deliver.