Seth is about 18 months old with chubby cheeks and a flock of blond hair. In normal circumstances you would think he was as cute as kitten. But with a sixteen-hour non-stop flight on a packed airplane, he is public enemy number one.
We had boarded in Dubai. Like me, most
passengers had come off connecting flights of varying lengths and had forsaken
sleep on that leg with the anticipation of making up for it on the long journey
to Auckland.
Seth, however, had different plans. He started
crying before the plane took off. As a parent, I immediately recognised the
type of wail. He was overtired. Had probably come off another connecting flight
where his Mother had desperately tried to get him to sleep and had
unfortunately failed. He had missed his window and no amount of gentle rocking
was going to carry him into slumber.
This crying went on for two hours until the
food arrived. Then his mother released him so that she could sleep and he took
off like he had just stolen something. It seemed that he had an issue that he
wanted to take up with the Captain, because that’s the direction he headed for
on about 25 occasions. Each time he took off he would mutter a high-pitched
scream and repeat the word “Bubba” at an ear splitting frequency. Each time,
his exasperated Mother or one of the even more exasperated crew would pick him
up and carry him back to his seat as he screamed and wriggled in an attempt to
escape.
This went on for about five hours, by which
stage the other 300 passengers would have happily strung him up in the galley.
Thankfully, he must have fallen asleep for a few hours before the wailing started
again as we approached Auckland.
It wasn’t like in the good old days when
Children were seen but not heard. I took my first long haul flight in 1988 in
the glamour days of international travel. Mind you, it was with Aeroflot, so
there wasn’t much glamour involved. I can’t remember if they showed a movie,
but if they did, it would have been in Russian. Smoking was discouraged, apart
from down the back by the toilets. The flight crew all seemed to be undercover
KGB agents or former Olympic shot putters. I remember at one point a muscular
stewardess walked down the aisle with a basket of apples and flung them to the
passengers in the way a kid on a bike delivers newspapers.
But at least the airport experience back then
was pleasant. A nice lady would look at your silky tracing paper ticket and
take your bags with little fuss and very little queuing. In the years before
cost accountants had looked at staffing levels, airports had appropriate staff
to deal with the passengers coming through. It’s an industry that knows exactly
how many customers to expect each day and pretty much how many there will be
each hour. But you still queue for hours at check in or security, as though the
airlines and airport staff are surprised that so many people who had pre-booked
flights had actually turned up.
In 1988, after a perfunctory look at your
passport, you could sail straight through to the plane. None of this belt and
shoe removing nonsense. Back then, you
could bring a rifle or a live animal on board and nobody would bat an eyelid.
My next long haul excursion was the grand daddy
of all my trips. This was a round the world tour in 1995/1996. I flew on the
queen of all long haul aeroplanes, the mighty Boeing 747. They definitely would
have played a movie on these flights, but it would needed to be bland enough to
meet the tastes and needs of two year olds and eighty year olds. Once airborne
and after dinner was served (the food was better then too) a large screen would
descend in the cabin and headphones would be distributed. A caption would
explain that the inflight movie had been formatted for airplane enjoyment,
which was code for “cut to ribbons to exclude all the naughty bits”. This meant
that it would run for about an hour and make no narrative sense.
If you didn’t fancy the movie, there was
another option. You could listen to a selection of golden oldie songs
introduced by an octogenarian BBC DJ, who mentioned the airline after every
song in return, one assumes, for free flights.
I started making more regular flights after
that to Australia and New Zealand. And then when I moved to the Southern
Hemisphere, I could regularly fly home to Ireland.
The entertainment got better. TVs in the back
of seats brought variety and meant that you could watch what you wanted, rather
than having to settle for the common denominator. But comfort went the other
way. As I became physically bigger, the seats became smaller and with tighter
leg room.
In the past month, I’ve finally been able to sample
the delights of long haul travel after a four year hiatus caused by “the
Thing”. I was curious to see if anything had changed. The needless queuing at
check in, passport control, security, boarding, disembarkation and baggage
retrieval has got worse. A two flight I took in Europe swallowed up six hours
of my time from arriving at one airport and leaving the other. Four years ago
they insisted you turned off your phone during the flight in case you
interfered with the electronics and risked crashing the plane. Now they insist
that you keep it on, so they can sell you overpriced Wifi.
