Why I've become a pessimistic traveller

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., December 27.)

I’ve become an abject pessimist when it comes to travel. Things go wrong so often that I’ve come to expect it.

It doesn’t take a bizarre occurrence like the recent shutdown at London’s Gatwick Airport to prove that airline passengers are at the mercy of events over which they have no control. It happens to me all the time. And while it’s possible that I’m jinxed, more likely it’s just the way things are. So many people are travelling that airlines and airports can’t cope.

On a trip last month, my wife and allowed two and a half hours between arriving at Sydney and catching an onward flight to Canberra – ample time to have a drink and an evening meal.

Fat chance. Our Qantas flight from Wellington left 90 minutes late – I can’t remember the excuse, and I don’t believe them anyway – and we ended up having to rush lickety-split between terminals to make our connection. Dinner that night came from a McDonald's drive-through in the Canberra suburbs.

Ten days later we were back at Canberra Airport for a Tiger Air flight to Melbourne. I know now, although I didn’t then, that savvy Australian travellers avoid Tiger Air. As well they might.

First, the inbound plane was late arriving, supposedly because of bad weather at its point of origin. Strangely, we didn’t hear of other flights from the same city being delayed.

Then, just as we were expecting a boarding call, we learned that one of the plane’s tyres had to be replaced, and the new one had to come from Melbourne.

Several hours passed before I watched a pair of engineers fit the new wheel. But by that time, the flight crew had exceeded their permitted hours and a replacement crew had to be flown in.

Long story short: we sat in the airport for 10 hours, eventually arriving in Melbourne after 11pm. By the time we got to our AirBnB accommodation, it was well after midnight.

In pitch darkness, we spent 10 minutes trying to get into the wrong property. The occupants of an apartment building in St Kilda are probably still wondering what lunatic was banging on doors and pressing buzzers at dead of night.

My narrative now shifts to Christchurch, where I recently flew for what should have been a cruisy one-day return trip from Palmerston North.

On arrival at the airport in Palmy I drove around the carpark for 20 minutes because there were no vacant spaces. A helpful man directed me to a long-term parking area, but I couldn’t get there because the terminal had been evacuated due to a fire alarm and my way was blocked by fire engines.

I ended up parking on a residential street more than five minutes’ walk away, and barely made my plane. You gotta laugh, as they say.

That evening, we were 15 minutes into the return flight from Christchurch when the captain announced we were turning back because of a warning light.

It soon became clear that none of us would be getting to Palmy that night. We spent more than an hour and a half milling around while four Air New Zealand staff arranged motel accommodation in Christchurch.

They did their best, but it was hard to avoid the feeling that they weren’t prepared for this sort of contingency. Anyone would think it never happened.

There was no seating, so it was no surprise when a passenger collapsed and was taken away in an ambulance. Another woman with a walking frame somehow managed, admirably, to stay upright.

By a happy coincidence I found myself in the company of a cousin who happened to be booked on the same flight. He was a calming influence (I'm not always patient in these situations) as well as providing congenial company. 

We were put in a motel on the far side of the city, so distant from the airport that it felt like I was halfway home already. Most of us went to bed without dinner, although my cousin had an apple which he ate while having a bath.

I eventually got home at 3pm the next day after flying back to Palmerston North via Auckland. As I said, you gotta laugh.

I relate these experiences not because what happened to me was outrageous or even exceptional. I hear of people of being subjected to far greater inconvenience by airlines that left them in the lurch and seemed unaccountable for their failings.

The common reaction from passengers is one of helpless resignation. Most people accept that the contract they enter into when they buy a plane ticket is overwhelmingly loaded in the airlines’ favour. They might get you to your destination on time, but if not … well, tough luck.

What struck me in both Canberra and Christchurch was how my fellow passengers stoically shrugged and accepted their plight as if it were the new normal – which, of course, it is. But I can’t help wondering whether airlines might sharpen their performance if people weren’t so infuriatingly good-natured.

THE PRICE WE PAY FOR LIVING IN GOD'S OWN COUNTRY

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 5.)

A FRIEND of mine recently reminisced that the first time he flew internationally, back in the 1960s, airline passengers dressed as if for a Sunday church service or a race meeting. He wore a suit and tie.

I recall doing the same when I first flew to Australia in 1972. Back then, flying had an aura of glamour. There was even a special term – “jet set” – for the elite who were privileged and affluent enough to fly regularly.

How quaint that seems now. The only airline passengers wearing suits and ties these days are the haunted-looking business types you see anxiously checking their emails in the oppressive corporate ghetto known as the Koru Club. Sensible long-haul passengers wear tee-shirts, track pants and sneakers, recognising that any trip longer than four or five hours is an ordeal more easily endured in loose, comfortable clothing.

Flying in the 21^st century is about as exotic and exciting as catching an Island Bay bus. The modern equivalents of the jet set are safely insulated in first or business class, well away from the resentful eyes of the lumpenproletariat. The rest of us travel in the modern equivalent of steerage, the fetid lower decks where the poor were crammed together in immigrant ships.

Air travel has become just another form of mass transportation: pack the punters in like battery chooks and distract them with multiple forms of in-flight entertainment in a futile attempt to maintain the pretence that flying is still a pleasurable experience – that getting there is part of the fun, rather than the endurance test it has become.

You may surmise correctly from this that I have recently been on a long plane trip. If there were an alternative way of travelling long distances, I’d happily take it, but it’s a curse inflicted on all New Zealanders that flying is something we have to do if we want to travel anywhere. It’s the price God exacts for living in His own country.

Is there any other nation on earth, I wonder, whose inhabitants have to fly for more than three hours before seeing anything other than water? Even Iceland, by comparison with New Zealand, is a mere hop away from its nearest neighbour.

Yet I read recently that New Zealanders, per capita, are the most travelled people in the world. You can put this down either to masochism or to sheer, stubborn perversity.

ONE THING about long flights, mind you, is that they give you ample time to ponder some of the peculiar things airlines do. 

Why is it, for example, that when modern aircraft are so technologically sophisticated that they can virtually fly themselves, their PA systems are still so primitive?

On a domestic flight I took in the United States last week, the softly-spoken flight attendant might as well have used semaphore to deliver her safety briefing. No one could hear a word. At the other extreme, I’ve known captains’ voices to come over the intercom at such ear-piercing volume that passengers’ teeth fell out.

I have also noted recently a propensity for airlines to refer to their passengers as “guests”, as in: “At this time [airlines always say “at this time”, never anything as prosaic as “now”] we will be boarding guests in rows 1 to 16.”

Now let’s get this straight: hotels have guests, airlines have passengers. I can only speculate that this new terminology, which sounds like the work of marketing shamans, is aimed at making us feel more valued.

The word “guest” carries subtle connotations of being pampered and cocooned. “Passenger”, on the other hand, implies simply being carried passively from one point to another, much as a sheep is carted to the abattoir. This is at odds with the image of air travel that airlines wish to convey, which is one of luxury and indulgence.

And what about the issue of cabin baggage? Airlines routinely make announcements about strict limits on the number and size of carry-on bags, but I have yet to see anyone enforce them. It has become the norm for passengers to struggle onto planes toting bags that far exceed the stated allowance, then hold up everyone behind them as they try to stuff their grossly oversized belongings into the overhead storage bins.

This is irritating enough in New Zealand but has reached truly farcical proportions in the US, where airlines charge extra for checked baggage. The inevitable result is that everyone tries to beat the charges by carrying all their belongings on board.

I have a recurring fantasy in which a cabin attendant – in my mind’s eye she would be a 180cm-tall blonde with icily cold blue eyes and wearing a black, SS-style leather coat – seizes one of these oversized bags and hurls it out onto the runway. And when the passenger whines in protest, she pulls out a Luger and coolly shoots him in the knee, IRA-style. That might make the baggage pests think twice.