For years, the aircraft flying above Jon Proudlove’s home in Cheshire stuck strictly to their routes as if they were keeping to lanes on the motorway. If he gazed east towards the Pennines, they were flying north, and if he looked west towards Merseyside, they were flying south.
That all changed during the pandemic: Proudlove noticed planes were taking advantage of empty skies to fly like crows, taking the shortest path to their destination.
Proudlove, a senior figure at the air traffic control firm NATS, had spotted a phenomenon that has cut 30 miles off the average length of flights in Britain and Europe. The savings add up to about 30,000 miles a day, equivalent to almost 30 flights from London to Malaga.
The change
