How I learned to love the airport bus

After landing at Gatwick, the plane taxied for five minutes or so and then came to a halt in the middle of an outlying patch of tarmac. I heard the engines wind down. ‘Oh shit!’ I thought to myself. ‘It’s going to be a bus.’ Until then, I had always felt short-changed and mildly resentful when forced to take a bus to the terminal rather than being offered a proper air bridge.

Then the pilot made an announcement so psychologically astute that I wanted to offer him a job.

‘I’ve got some bad news and some good news,’ he said. ‘The bad news is that another aircraft is blocking our arrival gate, so it’ll have to be a bus. The good news is that the bus will drop you off right next to passport control, so you won’t have far to walk with your bags.’

After years of flying, I suddenly realised that what he said was always true. The bus drops you off right where you need to be: you don’t have to lug your carry-on bags for 800 yards through a shopping centre before you can get to the exit. Yet, for most of us on the flight, this was a revelation. When we arrived promptly at passport control we were, for the first time, rather grateful for the bus. Nothing had changed objectively, but now we had a new story to tell ourselves.

This illustrates a simple truth about human psychology which dates back to Aesop and his fable of the fox and the grapes. Given the chance, our brain will do its best to minimise any feelings of regret, but it does need a plausible story to perform this feat. The reason we hated being bused to the terminal was not because it was intrinsically bad, but because nobody knew of any redeeming advantages to help us see it in a positive light.