Even as it deals with the fallout from COVID-19 travel restrictions, commercial passenger air travel finds itself approaching an even bigger challenge: that of its contribution to greenhouse gas emissions through its everyday operations, which also contribute to its increasing vulnerability. As a complex transportation infrastructure, air travel is key to many other systems around the world in economic, social, logistical, political, and cultural spaces, and its entrenchment in these systems is driven in part by our own expectations of air travel as being an available option. However, the COVID-19 travel bans have brought a huge shock to air travel, and also a rare opportunity in this very busy industry to pause and deeply reimagine what the future could be. Through an exploratory process of using strategic and ethnographic foresight, and analyzing the differences between how air travel is conceived both in formal and informal online discourses, key insights are generated as to the possible areas of leverage for getting the air travel industry to change faster, and also to help its passengers care more about sustainability.