Fear of Flying

You don’t need to be an eco-warrior to have great reservations about air travel these days. The airlines do far more than just pollute the atmosphere. They have taken all the pleasure out of foreign travel.

Have you tried to book recently?  There was a day when every town, small or large, had a helpful travel agency with knowledgeable, experienced staff who could make my dreams come true. That’s all in the past, now.

Instead, I am left with the D-i-Y online travel industry monsters whose very names are deceptions: They promise paradise but can it be plucked from Mediterranean hell?  

I have been trying to book a flight in the summer holidays for several weeks now and it is touch and go whether any of the airlines’ online booking systems are working when I try to log in.

If I do miraculously manage to connect, do I find what I want? It’s a jungle out there. Too many choices. Routes. Flight times. Why do they all leave at 5.45 in the morning and land back at 11.20 at night?

And then there is the quoted price. Never the same base price on the same route on the same day at the same time. I have to start all over it again when I come back to it a day later, having re-checked the school term times “Only three seats left at this price”, they fib.

And cost-wise the flight price is just the start. Add-ons will more than double the cost – so-called ‘inessentials’ like luggage and a seat, quite apart from any frills like speedy boarding (an oxymoron) or meal deals for food which amounts to microwaved salty cellulose.

I surmise that they are probably only trying to toughen me up for the actual airport experience. Check in queue, security queue, boarding queue.  Then there is a duty-free shop which costs more than the high street, and airport ‘outlets’ which would charge me an eye-watering sum - except my eyes are dry because I can’t bring water through security. Watching the screen in the lounge is like checking your lottery numbers. Never a winner.

But eventually I can join a route march to the gate. That’s another horror story. “Passengers in group one and two…”, the ground staff say forlornly as every single passenger presses forward, irrespective of where they will be sitting on the plane. This is the forerunner of the crush on an overfilled airport bus. I am pressed against a stranger who has something round his neck which gouges into me. Why do we put up with all this? There’s another queue up the steps of the plane and it starts to rain.

(This queue is formed because the passengers already on the plane didn’t heed, obey or care about the carry-on luggage rules and have items which they cannot even lift into the overhead lockers.)

Eventually, of course, we are all packed into this cigar-tube contraption, with a name painted on it like a cruise ship: The Princess Alexandra.

And it begins.

No, not the flight; don’t be daft. That’ll be another half hour at least because, as we are all informed, we have missed our slot. This is largely thanks to the woman who came on after other passengers, somehow being allowed to have two cabin cases and another square thing which cannot fit under her seat…

No, I’m talking about cabin-staff speak. A language all of its own. Tray tables that are not trays or tables, armrests which are not in the least restful. The safety instructions in the back of the seat in-front of you. “Please watch the safety demonstration”, which I cannot see because I am sitting next to a large woman who overflows into my seat space and constricts all movement of herself and me. She offers me a prawn cocktail flavoured potato crisp from a bag as big as a pillow case and despite the fact that I am trying read, insists on telling me about the sunscreen she bought at the airport because Denzil has forgotten to pack what she’d put out at home. Tut, tut, Denzil. He is sitting on the other side of the aisle for reasons I now understand.

The well-rehearsed words of the cabin staff are delivered without conviction. Smoke alarms in the toilets, “be careful when you open the overhead lockers as things may have moved during the flight and may fall out”. After years of experience, I am word perfect. And after the cabin staff blah, we get pilot-speak. Weather during the flight, the route, the time scale. “We hope to get underway in …” And eventually we get to that seven-word phrase which is every pilot’s pointlessly impossible entreaty: “sit back relax and enjoy the flight”.

Eventually we land. They see us off the flight with more polite slush. Back into a foreign crush-bus, passport control, baggage re-claim, an airport trolley with one wobbly wheel, and out through customs looking for the man who is supposed to be waiting and holding a sign with my name on it. As usual he’s not there. When my phone eventually decides to connect to ‘whatever-telecom’, I ring the number I was given and am told “he should be there waiting for you – have you gone to the pick-up point?” which I hadn’t been told about and is not signposted. Twenty minutes later Guido arrives, smelling strongly of cigarette smoke and smiling broadly. “I told was coming half past,” he lies in broken English, as he drives us away in his taxi without working seatbelts, horn honking through the evening traffic, out of town and on to prebooked pricey perfection.

Actually, surprise, surprise, the hotel, plucked improbably from a travel guide, is great. The whole time away the weather is perfect. The Worthington family from Todmorden whom my children befriend are delightful. So too is the little taverna or trattoria that I think I am the only one to have found apart from ‘the locals’.

And do I enjoy a minute of it. Not a chance. I cannot get out of my mind the prospect of the journey home.