If one is somewhat flexible then flying really isn't expensive in Europe too. Just checked Google Flights, and starting from Vienna it would cost 29€ to either Rome or London, 50€ to Malta and ~60€ to some Greek places, return flight inclusive.
Safe 20€ a month, which is possible for a huge chunk of the population (easily > 80%), and you can do four to eight of those flights a year and that's just the lower end of the estimation, most still just don't flight that much here, and it's IMO really not an income question.
It's more like an ecological footprint and also time question as flying adds an ineligible overhead one can often outrun by using the good train networks, well maybe apart from Germany where privatization really killed a lot of networks and quality during the last decades, plus I can get to a nice nature area within an hour easily, so why bother travelling as long to the airport to only then endure their security theater.
The climate doesn't care who benefits from emissions, only how much is emitted.
Air travel is much harder to do without fossil fuels than ground transport or electrical generation, and is essential to civilization on the basis of cargo alone. It's simply not an efficient target for change right now.
Some air travel may be essential to civilization, most of it isn't. We don't really have a way to determine which is which on a societal level. The best we can do is price in the externalities (and deal with income disparity, but that's an orthogonal issue).
Air travel itself is essential, it's one of the defining abilities of the modern world and can't just be shut off. It would be corrosive to try and separate the essential from the frivolous, I agree with that.
I favor carbon taxes that dig an industries grave for it: such as taxing coal to build nuclear, wind, solar. That's not feasible with air travel yet, which leaves a consumption tax, those are regressive.
You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable, or alternatives for work trips, or local tourism, or slow tourism, all kinds of things. Air travel itself may be defining and I don't envision getting rid of it; but the weekend trip to Vegas or Mallorca or Delhi is a defining feature of the present that is not sustainable in the future.
Taxing dirty electricity generation is regressive taxation, too; like I said, it's an original issue. A first step would be to pay out all the generated carbon taxes on a per capita basis.
> You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable.
This would never happen in America because it would require Americans addressing their views on transit and addressing their pitiful consumer rail or even consumer bus industries.
How much cargo actually goes by air? Last I knew boats (ships) were the vast, vast majority of cargo transport, followed by trains, then trucks, with planes coming a distant last.
This says nothing about the importance of the cargo which is transported by plane. Given the much higher expense, we would expect this cargo to be more important, not less.
