Airport whining and perspective failures

How do you know when a load of Australians has landed at Heathrow? You can still hear the whining long after the plane has landed. Yes, very droll. But airport whining is not restricted to people from the country where I was born.

On November 2, I returned to London after a weekend in Newcastle and picked up a copy of the Evening Standard at Kings Cross station for the tube ride home. The front page and a spread inside were dedicated to the "chaos" caused by thick fog at Heathrow airport. While the story was a change from their usual worship of Boris Johnson, it was just a compendium of first world whiners. Even Olympic cyclist Sir Chris Hoy joined in the moaning.

Apparently, the airlines and the airport could have done more. Nobody seemed to have any concrete suggestions about what could be done to fix a weather event beyond human control, but "more" of something was apparently required. The gripes centred on not receiving texts or emails from airlines in a timely enough manner. People were furious about turning up at the airport - presumably they travelled to the airport with their eyes closed, oblivious to the pea souper that shrouded the nation - only to be stunned that fog delayed their flights. Aside from the texts and emails warning passengers of likely delays and cancellations owing to fog, I'm not sure what else the airlines could have done. Tried to blow away the fog with giant hairdryers? How the hell did these overgrown babies cope with air travel before the advent of texts and emails?

Cancelled flights suck but flying in a plane where the pilot cannot see beyond the nose cone is hardly a reasonable alternative.

And this week, we've witnessed endless news time gobbled up by footage of British tourists stranded at Sharm el-Sheikh after the Russian plane crash and complaining that they just want to go home. I get it. Even after an idyllic holiday, there comes that bit at the end when you've packed up, headed to the airport, and your thoughts turn to being reunited with your own bed.

But, seriously, being stranded for a bit longer at a secure resort - and the resorts have stepped security enormously since the 2005 terror attack - is hardly the worst thing in the world. If I had to take an enforced extended Sharm holiday while I was waiting for a safe flight home and a news channel rocked up at my resort, I would happily appear on camera. I'd be thrilled to give a big up-yours to the terrorists by letting them know I was not scared of their murderous bullshit, that, despite the tragedy of the plane crash, I was determined to enjoy some bonus time in the sun, wearing a sinful bikini and drinking cocktails. Hell, it is only the fact that I am happily married that would stop me from adding fornication to my list of haram behaviour.

Of course, as soon as last night's Dr Who showed a scene where a plane was shot down, a Twitter fauxrage erupted. When I tweeted that the show is fictitious and the writers are not actual time-travellers who were to know that a plane crash, possibly linked to terrorism, was going to happen that week, some random internet stranger accused me of showing no respect to the Britons stranded in Egypt. Said internet stranger made no mention of dead Russians, just people stuck on sun loungers for a few more days.

This is the pathetic level of analysis going on at the moment - misplaced sympathy and kneejerk reactions to an episode of Dr Who. Of course, if the people who freaked out about the scene of the plane being shot down bothered to watch the entire episode, they would have seen it in its full context, which was a powerful allegory about the sorry state of the world and the futility of attempting to achieve peace with more war.

It was a stellar piece of acting by Peter Capaldi, it rose above such flinty noise as people whining in airports, and it was entirely appropriate for this Remembrance Sunday weekend.


Photography by Luisa Mota

Lufthansa, Germanwings and the reality that the world can never be 100% safe

The world can never be 100% safe. This is not a thought many of us want to dwell on when we are trying to go to sleep and it is cold comfort to anyone who lost a loved one in last week's Germanwings plane crash.

But it is the truth.

Two days after the crash, I flew to Prague with Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings. There was no sense of panic and it felt like business as usual. Aside from a predictably moronic headline about a "madman" pilot in The Sun and attention-seeking trolling from Katie bloody Hopkins, there has been a lack of hysteria since the crash. This is a good thing. Grief-stricken family members have spoken eloquently even when they are clearly angry with Andreas Lubitz. When the cause of the crash was completely uncertain, there was no awful rush to blame terrorists or condemn an entire religion.

The world can never be 100% safe.

Of course, an investigation into the crash is important and prevention mechanisms will be put in place. Assorted airlines have already started enforcing a policy of always having two people in the cockpit. And, no doubt, Lufthansa and other airlines will look into ways to more closely monitor the mental health of their staff.

But even then, there might well be another case down the line of someone else falling through the cracks. What do we do? If a doctor - or if anyone - suspects a pilot to be suicidal, do they have a duty to inform the airline? Should the doctor who issued Lubitz that fateful sick note, the one that was found torn to shreds, have been compelled to inform the airline that such a note had been issued and to share the dates Lubitz was deemed unfit for work? Would that be a breach of doctor-patient confidentiality? Or should people who fly planes be forced to give up an aspect of their medical privacy if it means lives may be saved?

Perhaps the cockpit door - the very door whose function is to keep the killers out - needs a security code that changes with each flight? Maybe this code would only be shared with select crew members in case the decision to lock the door endangers rather than protects people? Would this have stopped the terrified passengers witnessing the horrific spectacle of Captain Patrick Sondheimer yelling at Lubitz while trying to break the door down with a crowbar? But could an overriding security code also be used for dark purposes just as Lubitz did with the safety function that locked the cockpit door in the first place?

I don't pretend I know all the answers here. I am merely thinking out aloud. I first seriously thought about the notion of the world never being 100% safe when I visited the Volvo crash test facility in Sweden in 2010. Interestingly, they had an exhibit based around this idea - that we can do things to improve safety, and we should do things to improve safety, but a 100% safe world is not possible. I may be weird but I found that notion strangely comforting, that we should not live in fear, that we should take sensible precautions, but we should not fritter significant portions of our lives away worrying about things that may or may not happen and things that may ultimately be beyond our control.

Indeed, our flights over the weekend with Lufthansa were uneventful apart from one cancelled connecting flight, which led to a lost luggage debacle. Nobody we spoke to seemed to know why the flight was cancelled. Maybe people were panicking and cancelling their tickets? Or maybe the flight was cancelled for one of many reasons flights are cancelled around the world every day of the year. Maybe it was just one of those things, just as our temporarily missing luggage was just one of those things.

Perhaps last week's crash was "just one of those things", as flippant and disrespectful as that may sound. But it could also the "one thing" that leads to changes that will stop this hidoeus thing ever happening again. Or will it? Will pilots with depression just get better at hiding their condition? I know a lot of people who hide their depression well.

Could Lufthansa or any company have possibly foreseen such a genuinely shocking event any more than anyone could have predicted a couple of murderous maniacs were going to fly planes into the World Trade Center in 2001? It certainly should not be the start of a new wave of stigmatising people who suffer from depression. And, just as 9/11 or the shoe bomber idiot or the woes of Malaysian Airlines should not stop us from travelling, neither should the Germanwings tragedy.

The legacy of last week's tragedy should not be a world where even more people are terrified to travel, where more will miss out on the benefits that travel brings to people everywhere, where depression is further stigmatised. A world where the love of travel outweighs the fear of flying is the one that I want to live in, even if it can never be 100% safe.




Photography by John Edwards

The FA, BA and a load of BS...

Negotiations between the Football Association (FA) and British Airways (BA) over flying the English football team to Brazil for next year's World Cup have broken down. As a result, BA will not be flying a plane-load of multimillionaires for free to Brazil to play in a tournament in which they will be lucky to get past the pool stage.

Good on BA.

A source told The Sun newspaper that it would cost BA up to £10 million to take a plane out of service for the exclusive use of the English team, reschedule timetables and reassign crews. The source said: "In return, BA gets no more than a photo of the back of a plane in a few newspapers. In brutal terms, it just doesn't make sense."

Last time I checked, BA was a business, not a charity. And it is certainly not a charity that is obliged to fly the English football team for free. It's not as if we are talking about a kids' football team holding cake stalls and raffles to fund train fares for a match in the next county. We are talking about a team of players where they could all afford to pay everyone's return first class airfares and barely notice the cash missing. And it's not as is the FA is short on cash either.

The source is dead right. It is not worth the expense and logistical nightmares for BA just for a few photos in a few newspapers. The FA can pay for their own shit.

Here's the thing. If anyone from the FA is seriously trying to tell BA that flying England will be great publicity, they are not living on this planet. Thanks to booking flights online, a lesser reliance on travel agents and frequent flyer cards that involve multiple airlines, the way customers book flights is completely different compared to decades gone by.

People are not necessarily loyal to the one airline anymore.When people jump online to book flights, it's a matter of weighing up factors such as price and convenient times rather than slavish devotion to a "national carrier" (which in the case of most countries is an airline that was privatised years ago). Nobody is going to book a BA flight because one of their planes appeared in a photo in a newspaper with the English football team and a couple of pretty cabin crew posing on the stairs.

Now the word on the street is that Virgin might fly the team to Brazil. I guess £10 million for Richard Branson to pose with the team and act all patriotic-like is cheaper for him than paying his fair share of tax.