I thought that I would use some of my time to have a moan before I head off to Brazil.
AIRPORTS, SECURITY AND PLANES.
Having to say goodbye to driving a gorgeous truck and now relying on airplanes just does not give me a thrill. Personally, I think the airplane experience has gone downhill, rapidly.
I don't like the discomfort and tackiness of it. The
premise that to get from place to another, you have to sit crammed in a
little metal tube staring out of a tiny window. And worse, you have to use airports, and if you're
unlucky, possibly two or three.
Is there anywhere in life as bad as an airport? Well,
let's not fool ourselves. There are prisons and hospitals and morgues and
concentration camps and Blackpool and Kentucky Fried Chicken. But most of those
you don't have to experience simply to go to work.
The intended purpose of airport security is to protect us, the fare paying
passengers, from them, the psychopaths who want to blow up aeroplanes, or
hijack them and fly them to somewhere nice, or hijack them and fly them into
buildings. The real purpose of airport security is to make us feel as if
something is being done to prevent bad stuff from happening to us. If airport
security was actually about security, they would spend more effort on stopping
the baggage handlers from stealing from the luggage. I guess there's at least
some hope that poorly constructed bombs might detonate prematurely when they're
being tossed around by the ground crew.
Typical airport security precautions include:
-
X-raying luggage -- I presume that somebody looks at the X-ray screens, though
in my experience the staff are normally too busy chatting to be paying much
attention, and in any case, how are they're supposed to distinguish a laptop
computer from a bomb built into a laptop computer.
-
frisking anybody attractive or who looks as if they might find the experience
embarrassing,
- and don't forget that confiscating someone’s toothpaste is going to keep us safe. This is too ridiculous to entertain.
Duty Free Shopping is awful. As a resident of a modern western country, where smoking is banned in so many places, including airports, it is rare to see quite so many
cigarettes gathered together in one place.
What I really don't understand is why anyone buys consumer electronics in the
airport. It's overpriced and you're probably not going to be allowed to
use it on the plane, and if it goes wrong, are you really going to take it back
to whichever airport hellhole you happened to be flying from when you suddenly
felt a deep-seated urge to buy an electric razor or an MP3 player, or a
hand-held bloody computer? And the bookshops...it's said that the majority of
people in the world, buy only one book a year, at the airport bookshop, just before
they catch the aeroplane.
So, eventually, after surviving Duty Free for however long it takes for the
airline to find its aeroplane, put the luggage
on it, find the crew and figure out how to get people on board the aeroplane in
-- let's not kid ourselves -- a not very efficient manner, you find yourself on
board.
At this point the airline will make some token effort to reassure you that
flying is completely safe. It's crashing that's dangerous, but they try to make
out that that's safe too. This is particularly irritating. The operation of a
life jacket is explained. Have any significant number of people ever survived
an air crash into water? I think not. Perhaps they didn't remember to pull the
toggles on their life jackets or forgot that they could top them up by blowing
through the little tube. We are told to stow our luggage in the over-head
lockers so that in the event of a crash it will fall out and fly about the
cabin knocking peoples' heads off. The brace position is explained. The one
thing that we are not told -- and which is, apparently, the only piece of advice
which will genuinely do you any good in an emergency -- is
to count the
number of rows of seats between you and the nearest exit. The point is
that when the aeroplane catches fire, the cabin will fill with smoke and at that
point no amount of expensive cabin-floor strip lighting is going to help you
find the exits. At the same time as counting the rows, you should probably try
to assess which of the other passengers you should go around and which you will
be able to elbow out of the way. Although the chances of needing to use this
information in anger (more likely panic) are small, imagining
the harm you can do to your fellow passengers may help you while away the time whilst
you wait for the aeroplane to take off.
So, anyway, eventually the pilot finds the runway, you accelerate and you take off. Ooh, feel the power!
Right, that's the fun bit over.
Now you are subjected to the twin horrors of
airline food and `in-flight entertainment'. The food is rarely very exciting and not very edible. And then we have the ever helpful air stewards and hostesses. I dont think they really care about us. The airlines train them to think they are working at an expensive hotel, but they are basically
behind the counter at McDonalds serving the ungrateful masses. Not even
the alcohol can take the edge off.
(Oh, and a free tip to hijackers-- don't bother with the plastic cutlery. The
sharpest things on the aeroplane are probably the edges of those nasty foil
containers they put the food in.)
And then we come to `in-flight entertainment'. Or, rather, we don't. The last
thing I want to do on a flight is to watch old episodes of
Friends
or -- for national airlines -- programming about how great their country of
origin is. Alternatively they might show you a moving map display of where the
aeroplane is, which is depressing to watch. It's sad that 800km/h seems so slow.
Alternatively, you can just listen to piped music on the headphones provided
(which typically use some completely random connector in an effort to stop you
from using a pair of headphones which is actually any good).
Airplane seats are not suitable for tall or overweight people. I suppose if I was smaller and if my legs were a little shorter, I could just curl up in a ball and
wait for it all to stop. Perhaps the pilots get a better deal. Well, they get
a room to themselves, at least. I do wish I could fall asleep on
planes. I envy the people that pass out right away and wake up at their
destination.
Goodbye nice comfortable truck and hello airplane.
Brazil........Here I come !
