Libre Magazine

Who would have thought 100 years ago that everyday thousands of people would be willingly sealed into giant metal tubes and hurled across the sky at a height of 11,000 metres (36,000 feet), at unbelievable speeds by lethal exploding chemicals? All this in the full knowledge that if even one bolt on the plane has not been tightened properly you face certain death after a six minute high speed journey back to earth, at the appropriately named terminal velocity (190 kph since you ask).

During those six minutes you will have more than enough time to contemplate the horror of what is just about to happen to you and to ask the question ‘why me?’ On the plus side this is the only time in your adult life that you’ll be able to piss your pants without being embarrassed, you’ll never have to join an airport check in queue again and you’ll be in no doubt that this is the right time to ask God to forgive your sins. Even if you don’t believe in the Christian God there’s no harm in having a cost free insurance policy, is there?

Such are my thoughts every time I set off to the airport. On one particular occasion I remember returning from Chicago to Heathrow, London on an Air India flight on the day the terrorist plot to detonate liquid explosives on a flight from the UK to the USA was discovered.

We arrived at about 6pm for the flight at 8pm to discover that our flight was delayed at least 4 hours and that the baggage check-in was being especially thorough. Now instead of just checking our bags and seeing them disappear onto a conveyor belt we had to pile them up in a sort of luggage mountain so the security guards could practice their climbing skills and open a proportion of the bags to trawl through their contents. Contrary to instructions one or two bags had locks on them which were cut off with wire cutters. Don’t security guards know that a locked zip up suitcase, which most of them are these days, can be easily opened by sticking a biro into the zip and waggling it about? The suitcase can then be rezipped and will be as good as new.

Travelling from large airports is never a pleasant experience due to the endless queuing, the restrictions, the fact that we all have to be treated as terrorist suspects, the boredom and our own deep held need to compete with our fellow human beings. To which we now added the fear of being blown up by terrorists. Our response was to laugh bravely making weak jokes about the explosive dangers of eating bean curry.

The endless queuing starts in the carpark where we wait for the bus to airport, then for the check in, then for the security, then for the bus to the aeroplane and finally we queue to take our seat on the plane. If the queuing is not well organised tensions arise as people try to guess which queue will take the shortest time, casually join the queue not at the back but part way down at the side. Sometimes people with knowledge know that the signed route is not the shortest one and can skip ahead of the queue. All people have an acutely tuned sense of fairness so anyone seen to be gaining an advantage generates irritation in fellow passengers.

On this occasion we watched as a particularly pushy family of four, each with an enormous bag bulging at the seams and big enough to contain a baby elephant weaved their way to the front of the queue and tried to claim their bags were hand luggage. The check-in girl was having none of this and firmly but politely advised them that the bags had to go in the hold and they’d have pay for overweight bags. There was a bit of tension before the family accepted the decision. You’ve got to sympathise with the check-in staff its often not a nice job.

Our flight was called and we sat down at the departure gate, where this same family started a queue so as to be first on the plane. It was with some satisfaction that I noticed that they had to stand for nearly an hour before we were allowed to take our seats for the flight.

Eventually we took off, 5 hours late, for the long journey back to London. Back in my car in London the petty squabbles of the airport behind us I ponder the fact that 100 years ago this journey would have cost me several years salary, could well have taken months, most of the time spent in enforced idleness on a ship with a much higher risk of dying at sea that we run now even with terrorists. Perhaps we all need to make sure we’ve thought about what really matters before entering a major airport.