Higher fares don’t deter holiday fliers:

The price of flying home for Christmas has jumped nearly 14% in the last two years, but higher fares haven’t put a dent in robust holiday demand for air travel.

The average price of a domestic round-trip plane ticket this season is $362 before taxes. According to an analysis for USA TODAY by Sabre Airline Solutions, a unit of travel giant Sabre Holdings, that’s up 5.8% from a year ago and 13.8% from two years ago.

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A major reason for higher fares: More passengers will be squeezing into roughly the same number of airplane seats on domestic flights as a year ago. To boost fares and make the most of every tank of jet fuel, U.S. carriers have scheduled the same amount of domestic flying capacity as last holiday season despite stronger passenger demand.

Related: Study shows High Speed Trains emit less carbon than planes

A few things spring to mind in reading these and similar stories:

• Of course people will still travel for the holidays despite higher prices. What do you think? People will let a 14% price increase over two years stop them from visiting loved ones, often as part of along-running family tradition? It would take a much higher financial incentive to make them cancel those trips.
• The same thing goes for flying as part of more mundane vacations–for most people they’re a rare, “special” event, so anything less than a crushing price increase won’t slow them much.
• If you really want to figure out how prices (and, more generally, non-monetary costs) are slowing air traffic, look at business travel. I know all too well that a lot of business travel is a “must”, as in sales people who have to be there in person to close a deal, etc. But much of it can be cut back, whether canceled outright or replaced with teleconferencing.

More broadly, where is airline travel going? This is where the uncertainties really pile up. The biggest one is how much coal can be used to alleviate the impact of higher oil prices. The evidence is growing that we’ll be able to conquer the technical issues with creating and using jet fuel from coal. We might have to limit it to being only a portion, perhaps 50%, of the fuel burned in a plane, but at least that much of a solution seems to be within reach and economically feasible. But how cleanly can we convert coal into jet fuel? And even if we can capture and sequester 100% of the CO2 from the conversion process, how willing can or should we be to keep burning jet fuel, whatever its source, in massive amounts? The key is to find as many ways as possible to keep the carbon in the ground, not find new, better ways to convert it into CO2 in the atmosphere.

As always, there’s the issue of scale. A few test flights using coal-derived fuel is meaningful, in terms of proving the technology, but what will it take to scale up production in an acceptably clean way to replace enough oil to make a difference to commercial aviation in general? That’s a much tougher, and often overlooked, problem.

A second factor and source of uncertainty is the growth of alternatives to flying. Thanks to the Internet, businesses and individuals can use quite acceptable teleconferencing today; the fact that it’s still grossly under utilized makes it yet another piece of low-hanging fruit just waiting to be plucked whenever we get around to it. Will we see expanded use of passenger trains? For some regional travel, I think it’s highly likely, although I doubt it will be a major factor in reducing overall airline traffic.

To be honest, I don’t see anything but contraction the future of airline travel. Cars can, are, and will be made radically cleaner, and trucks of all sizes and even locomotives can use less fuel and emit less CO2 with various forms of hybrid technology. But airplanes will forever be under downward pressure from global warming. Add to that the likelihood of continuing pressure from rising fuel prices, and the entire commercial airline sector looks like it’s stuck between a rock and a hard place with water rising in the middle. It’s entirely possible that in the next 5 to 10 years we’ll see many of the airports that are stretched to the limit today by the volume of flights and passengers dealing with excess capacity.

Or perhaps someone will find a way to teach a horse to sing.