There’s a garden centre I quite like which is at the end of the runway at Manchester airport. I like to go there because you get a very close up view of the aircraft taking off and landing as you potter about picking and choosing your plants. I was there a few days ago, and it struck me that air travel is one of the few times in your life that, as a so-called ‘ordinary’ person muddling your way along through life, you’re made to feel ‘special’ in any significant way any more.
It does, of course, rather depend upon the airline, though, and I could tell you hideous tales of lengthy flights spent cooped up in the sort of cubic area where you start to envy a battery chicken, being sprayed with insecticide and fed the worst meal of my life before getting the ‘harrumphs’ of a fellow passenger as I tried to squirm my way back into my seat after my brief absence to attend to a call of nature had been seen as an opportunity for the person in front of me to lean back their own seat and reduce my space still further, leaving me to have to bend and twist my body like a Rubik Snake to sit myself back down again.
Naming no names, but the airline name means “One Who Reigns”.
Nevertheless, I maintain that the principle is still valid. Once you’ve checked in, you don’t have to carry your bags as they are being whisked away by the unseen baggage handling wizards and, after you’ve gone through the various security checks and taken your seat, you are generally treated pretty cordially. There are very few situations in my life where I’m actually referred to as ‘sir’ anyway, at least not many where I’m not at least wondering whether I’m in some sort of trouble.
But I think that it’s more than that. Airports themselves are generally very quiet places, I find. Maybe it’s the all-pervading sense of unspoken fear that most of us have before clambering aboard those rather flimsy looking metal tubes. Airports can sometimes be almost as hushed as cathedrals, especially once you’re through the security checkpoints and away from the ticketless general non-flying public and heading for the gate. I particularly like arriving at airports at those strange times of the day when the rest of the world is asleep and your own body clock is all over the place and you’ve still got that buzzing in your ears from the flight and the euphoria chugging around your system that tells you that you’ve actually made it and survived the journey.
When you are an airline passenger, especially if you are one not causing the crew any problems, you are treated with courtesy and politeness by pleasant and professional people, and whilst the GBP have developed a tendency to dress down to a horrifying degree for air travel purposes in recent years, it’s interesting to compare the reaction to that general slovenliness to that which you might get if you showed up at a city centre restaurant in similar garb. No matter how dressed-down you might be, even if you’re looking like you’ve just popped to Asda for a few sausages rather than visiting a whole new country and helping them to confirm their less than impressive opinion of the Brits abroad, the aircrew will bring you drinks and meals and serve them up to you individually, and treat you with a certain amount of respect as long as you are being respectable yourself.
Back in the 1930s, of course, when passenger air travel was really only just starting up and could only be afforded by the wealthy, things were very different. If you had booked a ticket, the airline would send a car to pick you up and deposit you at the airfield about ten minutes before your plane was due to fly. Meals of many courses were served up on porcelain plates by silver service flight attendants and the food was eaten with proper cutlery. Cheap airline travel may well have opened up the world to the masses, but somewhere along the way we’ve managed to lose an awful lot in the way of the standard of treatment that we are prepared to accept. For many of us the whole process of getting to the airport and checking in at the required time before hanging around in various lounges waiting for the flight to be called takes longer than the actual flight itself, and we call this progress?
No wonder they feel they have to be so polite to us.
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