Extinction Rebellion

The reality is that in the modern world at least some flying is necessary. Making distinctions between different reasons for flying and types of flying is entirely valid.

Well. Read your second sentence here again. It's straightforwardly true because you can make distinctions between different types of flying. However, what you appear to mean, that one ought to evaluate different types of flying (based on whatever criteria, let's not worry about those for now) is something I consider completely irrelevant, as all types of flying are roughly equally damaging in their environmental impact. The seemingly essential, comparatively harmless kind, like in your example ...

For example, I was in the Philippines back in January and took an internal flight from Manilla to Tuguegarao to go to a wedding. It was with a budget airline - pretty much their version of Ryanair with every seat filled and not much leg room. This is one of the most efficient ways to fly because the capacity utilisation is about as good as it gets.

Sat next to me were a big group of midwives from Ilagan going down to Manilla for essential training. The trip by road takes 12 hours, and believe me, Philippino roads are dangerous: someone dies every hour, which is 28 people a day, over 10,000 people a year. They were going to learn techniques to reduce infant mortality - literally life saving work.

... together are easily as damaging as the comparatively low numbers of individually more damaging flights, e.g. private jets. There is a symbiosis, so you want to deal with it all together.

And, as ever with things that are merely the symptom, not the cause, flying fails to achieve basic utility and doesn't compensate for what is behind it, which is the basic problem with (particularly motorised) transportation: It is a symptom of a lack of sustainable arrangements for living, i.e. that XYZ isn't local, can't be got locally, etc., e.g. their 'essential' training thatm, despite being essential, isn't available in Ilagan, although it obviously should be.

In the example of the Philippines, their rail network is almost non-existent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_the_Philippines

Rail is not massively sustainable, but vastly more so than flying or motorised road transport. The internal flights are merely a symptom of the lack of rail (so far, I note plans to expand rail). (I don't say 'a symptom of the lack of roads', as the last thing I want to see are more motorways.) Perpetuating flying there is only going to delay investment in better forms of transport. Needless to say, the Philippines are a mountainous island country and it won't be possible everywhere to build rail or RRORO ferries, but with modern engineering it's not at all impossible.

Do you really think that making a distinction between their travel and Emma Thompson's unsustainable, extravagant lifestyle is a distraction? I sure don't.

Yes. Concentrate on the underlying causes and not the symptoms.