As an occasional flyer the whole process holds a fascination. Air travel hasn’t yet become routine for me in the way that heading off to the local supermarket in the car has. There is a certain thrill about it – usually that moment when the Pratt and Whitney’s burst into life and we accelerate off down the runway. It’s that feeling of no return. Either we will rise gracefully into the sky or it will all end horribly in a fireball in a Paisley back garden!
When stripped back to its fundamental parts it is amazing that anyone willingly chooses to be an airline passenger. Everything about it is wrong. Due to their nature, every airport is inconveniently located. With any luck it might be vaguely close to our destination. As a result parking, pick-up and drop-off has become a rip-off side industry. How can it be that parking a car can cost more than the flight itself? Check-in times mean that that we are compelled to hang around these depressingly insipid places, bristling with security cameras and armed police, for up to three hours prior to take-off. We are humiliated by Security, stripped of our clothing and dignity. We all meekly submit in the fear that one of us might be a terrorist. We then strap ourselves, shoulder to shoulder, into a metal tube to be hurled seven miles up into the sky in the expectation, or perhaps blind hope, that we will be delivered back to terra firma at the time and location promised on our ticket. And yet we do – and pay handsomely for the ‘privilege’.
We booked our flights to South Africa with Emirates. Somehow it is cheaper to take a huge detour via Dubai than it is to fly direct. Over the four legs we flew on three Boeing 777s and an Airbus A380 – that’s the massive double-decker that’s struggling to find its niche in the operator fleets. It’s just too big! But then the 777s aren’t exactly small. They are roughly the same size as the A380 but in a purely single-decker format. And amazingly, to me at least, they have just two engines – indeed the world’s largest twin-engine design.
Long-distance air travel is boring. Apart from the excitement of take-off and landing and the occasional turbulence, nothing happens - for hours. The entertainment systems are impressive in the range of films, news and sports channels and music on offer. I worked my way through the entire cycle of Tchaikovsky symphonies. But of most interest is the flight information channel. Along with data such as how high, how fast, how long, how far, how cold it is outside, are maps showing current location and the earth’s shadow. In the absence of cloud, it is possible to look out the window and identify features and settlements below. The outbound flight took us across The Netherlands, central Europe and Turkey before making a sharp right-hander to head south over Iran, thereby noticeably avoiding Syrian airspace. Likewise on the return, we headed north over the Caspian Sea with fine views of the Caucasus on the port quarter. The eventual sharp left-hander had us avoiding eastern Ukraine. We then headed over Kaliningrad, The Baltic Sea, Sweden, Denmark, various North Sea oil installations and a snow-topped Cheviot before the Glaswegian gloom blotted all out. In contrast, Africa really is the Dark Continent. The only place that I could identify was Dar-es-Salaam and the coastal lights of Zanzibar.
Then there are the technicalities that fascinate me. How is it that the fuel doesn’t freeze at minus sixty degrees and that there is sufficient oxygen at 40,000 feet? The wings flap alarmingly whenever turbulence is encountered. The stresses and strains must be enormous. What do these things weigh? Apparently the maximum take-off weight of a 777-300ER is 351 tonnes. Fair enough. The maximum landing weight is just 251 tonnes. Am I the only one who finds that alarming? Having taken off, the thing cannot then land until is has burned off two-thirds of its fuel, or found some other way of jettisoning 100 tonnes. What is the fuel economy of one of these Boeings? Assuming that range (7370 miles) is a function of fuel consumption and tank capacity (181,283 litres), then, in good old English, it consumes 5.42 gallons per mile. With 396 passengers on board, that equates to 0.0137 gallons per passenger per mile. This would be the equivalent of a single-occupancy commuter driving a car that does 73mpg. I suspect the average car only travels about half that distance on a gallon. So whilst air travel is not exactly environmentally friendly, it’s no worse than the way we typically use our cars. But driving to South Africa would be, well, problematic! It would likely involve two ferry crossings, French fishermen, the world’s largest desert, rain forest, a number of civil wars, dirt roads, failed states, huge amounts of spare fuel and food, goodness knows how many currencies, terrorists, malaria, unconcealed corruption, and an awful lot of time and stamina. Whilst a 24 hour door-to-door journey from Fearnan to Somerset West might seem grueling, the alternatives are less appealing. And one is very well looked-after on long distance flights.
‘Would sir like red or white wine?’
‘I think white will complement the chicken fricassee beautifully. And then maybe a red to go with the cheese and biscuits’
‘Tea or coffee, sir?’
‘I’ll have a brandy please.’
‘Certainly, sir’.
And later – ‘may I have a single malt whisky?’
Whatever you ask for is just provided. This is why we fly. It is a relatively cheap, reasonably pleasant, means of visiting far, far away places - places that are warm and exotic, seductive, mysterious, glamorous. At least they are according to the glossy propaganda. Airports may be abysmal but at least the all-the-frills airlines do their best to make up for that. And then, just as you are mellowing and thinking it’s not so bad, you arrive at another airport and hit the immigration queue…
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