Surviving low-cost airlines
One of the advantages of travelling frequently between the UK and Poland is that you become a master at the art of flying on low-cost airlines. I used to have a black belt in it – but somehow I've lost my skills. A combination of too little practice in recent months and subtle changes in the system have left me looking like a pathetic amateur.
The problems really begin when you buy your ticket. "This is so easy and convenient," you think to yourself as you type and click away doing all the work airlines used to have to do for you. "Yes," you grin, "I would like to check in online – that will save me from standing in long queues at the airport having my feet trodden on by Italians." Later, as you are standing in a long queue at the airport having your feet trodden on by Italians, you realise you have again been tricked. Since nobody has yet invented a way to email suitcases, you still have to physically hand them over to the airline, which means queuing up at desks that have half the number of staff they used to have because everybody checks in online.
Queuing is, in fact, a mistake only made by amateurs. If you have the ambition of one day being recognised as a saint, try the following exercise. Turn up at the airport in plenty of time to check in your luggage for a flight to London. Discover the queue is 17 times longer than you could have imagined. Stand patiently, shuffling forward every five minutes, for what feels like four days. When you are just about to reach the desk, have an airline employee shout across the room: "All passengers flying to London come to the front of the queue now!" Sensible travellers will spend an extra hour in bed, turn up hideously late, and be waved to the front of the queue, stepping lightly over the convulsing bodies of those who had been foolish enough to arrive early.
The departure lounge is where the airlines' masterly manipulation of human psychology is truly revealed. Most airports no longer announce gates, you have to watch the little screens to find out where your plane is leaving from. They deliberately reveal the gate as late as possible. Your boarding pass says that the gate closes promptly at 5:30, but it's 5:28 and you still don't know which one to head for. The result is that, as soon as that little orange number appears, everybody on that flight runs – they couldn't get us to move more quickly if they used cattle prods and dogs.
Only a couple of years ago boarding used to be divided into three or four groups. It didn't matter how quickly you got to the gate, if you were in group B, you still got to go through before the poor saps in group C. Now it's just 'speedy boarding' and all the rest. This means that sitting as close as possible to the little desk where they tear your boarding pass in half has become vitally important. If you get a good seat, it's possible to hire out your lap on the black market for as much as two small packets of peanuts.
There is always a moment at the gate when a room full of sitting people suddenly becomes a room full of people standing in a queue. It happens incredibly quickly and nobody knows what triggers the change. Somebody somewhere interprets a facial tick or a random arm movement and we are instantly 150 racehorses ready to squeeze through the eye of a needle.
The queue goes through several stages of evolution, each one of which involves people deciding they are comfortable standing slightly closer to the person in front of them than they were a minute ago. In other words, the longer you are in a queue that isn't moving, the shorter it gets – a phenomenon that could have profound implications for our understanding of physics and post offices.
Actually sitting down on the plane is far from the end of your problems. It used to be possible to sip a couple of gin and tonics in the departure lounge, sit through the takeoff and the captain reeling off some nonsense about being 11 kilometres above Düsseldorf and then slip into a peaceful snooze until the engines abruptly throttle down for the final descent. Not any more. The airlines have caught on to the fact that you and your money are going nowhere for two and a half hours and that this is, therefore, an ideal opportunity to separate one from the other.
The adverts start as soon as you sit down. The immediately forgettable music playing over tinny speakers is repeatedly interrupted by exhortations to buy one or another beverage that will enable you to 'chillax.' My favourite is for an 'energy drink' with 'only four calories,' which, given that the calorie is a unit of energy, makes about as much sense as a water soluble life vest.
A while later, just as you are nodding off over your book, the PA system starts shrieking about scratch cards. Lottery tickets always strike me as the worst possible thing to sell on an airplane. Million-to-one chances are the last thing I want to be reminded of while sitting in a fragile aluminium tube thousands of metres above the ground. "Relax," say aviation experts, "You've got more chance of winning the lottery than being killed in a plane crash." "Hey," say the airlines "Want to buy a lottery ticket – you could totally win!" Ultimately I choose to stay away from airborne lotteries because, if I did win and became rich, I would inevitably be tempted to travel further and more often by plane.
Jamie Stokes