Jenny McCartney Jenny McCartney

Civilised air travel? Pigs might fly

Does anyone actually enjoy flying     any more? I know I don’t. I realised recently, while anxiously repacking my tiny carry-on case with its cache of toiletries dribbled into miniature bottles, that travelling with an airline now feels a bit like going on holiday with a friend who — just beneath the surface — actually hates you. With every trip, it seems, airlines grow angrier and stingier, stripping away any remaining perks and then making us stump up to buy them all back. Their profits have grown fat on the commerce of small differentiations, micro-transactions around fragile scraps of sanity and time. On the budget airline easyJet, for example, you are allowed one piece of cabin baggage, but no handbag. That is unless, of course, you have splashed out on easyJet Plus (annual membership £199) which will graciously permit said handbag — and its precious cargo of passports, boarding cards, money and keys — to travel by your side. This membership will also green-light speedy boarding — or at least speedier-than-thou boarding — which at a certain crucial point will allow its owner to stroll past a gaggle of stalled travellers who are still huddled in a queue, hot and bickering. In effect, it buys you five minutes and a frisson.

Those of us who clicked quickly past the paid-for extras while booking, however, will later discover that the separation of a woman from her handbag creates a psychic disturbance — even if that handbag is nearby, having been forcefully compressed into a highly resistant piece of carry-on luggage. No matter: this disturbance will be just one among many that began at home with the repeated malfunctioning of the printer needed to print out the boarding cards, and continued through the dreary, but necessary, slog through airport security, right up until the apologetic squeeze into the seat and the tight scramble for stray cash for a tepid butty from the stewardess’s clanking trolley.

Indeed, given the prevailing atmosphere of low-level punishment, it is only remarkable that remaining pockets of civility are so often to be found among the stoic flight attendants.

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