In the weeks before and immediately after Obama's historic election - still loving that btw - the CTRL heads staged a series of demonstrations outside the embassies of countries who were (quite stupidly) banning HIV positive travellers from entering their country.
As important as these protests were, they were nothing compared to the storming of Stansted Airport at 3am on Monday morning. I thought the 8am start at The Russian Embassy was bad enough.
You always have to look for silver linings and one possible peripheral advantage of all the rubbish during the Bush years is the re-introduction of public protest, particularly among the young.
Going to an airport when its dark (and obviously colder than an ice pole inna the north pole) is not fun and is wildly different to holding a placard and shouting some slogans, however badly they may need to be heard. It must be hard to cut through a six-foot security fence in those conditions. It's hard enough to button a shirt when your hands are freezing. So if you participate you must really want to be there.
Plane Stupid, the organisation who claimed responsibility for the sit in on a taxiing strip to the main runway, have been criticised for disrupting passengers with their protest but in order to even have half a hope of making any sort of real impact you have to hit them where it hurts. Ryanair was forced to cancel 56 flights and a lot of other airlines experienced severe delays. Only this kind of action will make them take notice. "We lost how much?" You can hear the various CEO's screaming at their poor accountants.
Plane Stupid, who were eventually removed from the airport at around 8am, have a point. The government makes all sorts of nice noises about being committed to carbon reduction but then last month they decided to give the go ahead to an expansion of London's third largest airport. You can't have it both ways. No one expects them to change their minds just like that but hopefully some sort of impression has been made. A boycott of airlines by the public would be better but that isn't going to happen.
In the immediate future, security is obviously going to be beefed up to ridiculous levels, especially as people fly off to here and there for Christmas. But at some point the aviation industry is going to have to deal with this issue and in a proper way too. Somehow i don't think this is the last protest of its kind and where there's a will. City Airport may get hit. The large amounts of business people that pass through there on the regs may make it a particularly attractive option. Manchester, Glasgow or one of the smaller provincial airports may prove less problematic than those in the capital. But Heathrow and Gatwick are obviously the biggest prizes. And Heathrow has just had a fifth terminal built. Will one of these places get the Plane Stupid treatment?