Flying Without Friction

I was rushing through my morning routine earlier, prepping for yet another flight, my umpteenth this year, when frustration suddenly hit. I was squeezed between back-to-back meetings before takeoff and presentations waiting the moment I landed, and it struck me: why is air travel still this broken?

Air travel hasn’t fundamentally changed in over fifty years. We still show up hours early, shuffle through a ‘security theatre’, sit in aluminium tubes eating bad food, and pretend the experience is anything other than necessary suffering. The industry is really optimised for one thing and that’s cramming more bodies into less space and yet somehow, we still call this progress.

But what if there is an opportunity to start over by not treating airports like people processing centres and start treating them like filters that we can bypass entirely. The real inefficiency isn’t the flight. It’s everything before and after it. Security, boarding, baggage claims, connections. All friction. All very fixable.

Imagine if you booked a flight and your phone became your airplane. Biometric verification happened once during booking with facial recognition, fingerprints and whatever else they need to scan. Your identity is cryptographically linked to your ticket. No boarding pass, no ID check, no shuffling through lines showing documents to people who barely glance at them. You walk through the airport the way you walk through a turnstile at your train station with contactless payment. Sensors read you, verify you, let you through. Two seconds, not twenty minutes.

Baggage? Gone, or at least separated from the passenger flow entirely. You drop your bag at any verified location: a hotel, your home or even office and it routes independently to your destination. You don’t have to see it again until it arrives where you’re going. The bottleneck of everyone wrestling suitcases through terminals evaporates. Airlines already know how to move cargo efficiently. Passengers shouldn’t be cargo handlers.

Then let’s rethink the planes as well. We’re stuck with the bus-in-the-sky model because we assumed one-size-fits-all cabins made economic sense. But modularity changes everything. Configure planes with swappable cabin sections optimised for different passenger needs: sleep pods for red-eyes, work modules with desks and connectivity for business travellers, social areas for families, minimal seating for short hops (yes, Michael O’Leary was ahead of his time in thinking about the standing ’tickets’ on Ryanair, despite being turned down. I personally think that needs a re-think).

Same aircraft, different internal configurations based on route and demand. Airlines could finally differentiate on experience instead of racing to the bottom on price and legroom.

Imagine detaching boarding from aircraft turnaround. Passengers board modules on the ground while the plane is still in the air approaching. I know this might sound a bit Jetsonsesque but hear me out. The aircraft lands, the deplaning module detaches and rolls away, the pre-boarded module slides into place, and the plane takes off again. Turnaround time collapses from an hour to fifteen minutes. More flights, less waiting, better aircraft utilisation.

The constraint has never been technology. It’s our imagination. We’ve been incrementally improving a fundamentally broken model when what we need is to ask why we’re still doing it this way at all. Air travel could be made more seamless, personalised, and efficient. It just requires admitting that the current system isn’t a foundation to build on and a legacy to replace just like we’re doing with the technology that runs the crafts and airports.