The magic of air travel

Recently I’ve sent a lot of time on planes and in airports.  Unfortunately for a person as chatty as me, much of this time has been spent alone.  I say unfortunately because when you are an economy class plebe like me, air travel can be filled with mysterious and frustrating happenings that just beg to be discussed. 

Right now I’m writing from the cabin on KLM flight 0571 where we are waiting on the tarmac in Kilimanjaro for an hour before continuing on to Dar es Salaam.  Luckily between my laptop, kindle, i pod and the cake I saved from our mid-flight snack, I have a lot of entertainment options.

Indulging in my lawyerly love of the list format here go my air travel musings:

Pearson Terminal 1

•  KLM and Air France might have one of the most confusing check-in procedures I’ve witnessed and frankly, that’s saying a lot.  You arrive upon a mass of people converging upon one another at the end of terminal one, all carting their international-two-suitcase-plus-maximum-limit-of-allowable-carry-on-luggage.  Soon you realize that the only clear line-up (or to be technical, non-line up, because no one is in it) is the business/1^st class check-in counter.  The rest of the crowd lumbers around between ambiguous KLM and Air France lines only to find out that they mysteriously have to go to a poorly demarcated computer kiosk to print their boarding passes and then join huge poorly identified lines to check in their bags with employees who check your passport and visas and seem fully capable of also printing boarding passes.  Maybe it’s my inner Luddite acting out, but isn’t the point of replacing people with machines to replace the people?!?

• If you are lucky, you wont find out that the line you joined is actually the one for the security check-in, not the airline check-in… seriously, you have to see this chaos to believe it! The length of the security line increases the blood pressure of the people who like me are waiting in the obscenely long baggage check lines while watching the clock march steadily towards boarding time.  At Pearson the illusion of a long security line is created by the deep attachment Torontonians evidently have for one another.  It is barely an exaggeration to say that a third of the people in the security check line aren’t even traveling.  That’s in addition to the people lining the edges of the security line area!!!

Duty Free

•  Who doesn’t love tax-free luxury items? Indulging myself, I bought a bar of Clinique soap from the Duty Free immediately past the security check. I showed my boarding pass, handed the cashier my credit card, paid and then expected to get my soap. No dice.  I asked ‘Will it be delivered at my gate?’ (I don’t understand the reasons for this procedure either, but I’ve seen it before) to which she responded, ‘No, you have to pick it up at the Duty Free closer to your gate’.  That’s right, so then I walked 5 minutes to that Duty Free and waited 10 minutes next to a makeshift clothes rack beside the cashiers for a dude driving one of those airport golf cars to drive my soap down to me.  Seriously? Feel free to help me out on the logic of this!

Seating Etiquette

•  What makes you ‘deserve’ an aisle seat?  Is it having a good travel agent like I did? Coming to the airport 5 hours early like the dude across from me? Paying the extra $80 at the gate? Being large? Having family on the plane? Seating arrangements can bring out a lot of emotions between strangers on planes.  I am not immune to this, this past summer having begged to be switched from a seat next to two people with a baby AND a dog!!! (like come on!).  Today I witnessed a woman who wanted the 5-hour dude to trade his aisle seat with her husband who had a middle seat elsewhere in the plane.  Dude was defiant, but sought reassurance from those of us around him.  I gave it, because I also had an aisle seat while the really big man next to me was crammed in the middle.  This is the aisle-seat winner’s burden: should you give up your comfort for a stranger’s? What must their level of suffering/discomfort be? Dude and I decided ‘not high enough’ and kept our seats.  Go ahead, judge me.

• Packed in like sardines as we are, space creates other issues for passengers just trying not to go crazy while crossing the Atlantic.  An excellent example is seat reclining.  Ok, it’s a long flight, I dig it, maybe you need to lie back while you do your sleeping.  But do you need to lean back before take-off, when you are just going to be asked to bring your seat up in 30 seconds?  Even if you are exceptionally comfortable, shouldn’t you at least raise your seat to allow the person in front of you to have their boxed meal?  I read an article in the Globe and Mail in December describing a new product that you can use to actually inhibit the ability of the person in front of you from reclining: http://www.gadgetduck.com/html3/freq/faq_kd.htm  I think the product should come with contracts that you can enter into with the people in front of you so that everyone knows the rules of engagement… prepare for sky-fights!

Security?

•  Once I watched an episode of 60 Minutes that suggested that a lot of the security measures in the United States are more for show than anything else.  It has been hard to shake the resultant feelings of frustrated skepticism in lines ever since.  Here are some of my questions:

• Why do some people have to take their shoes off and others not? Today the woman in front of me had to take off her hiking boots and I didn’t (granted they weren’t the exact same hiking boots…)
• Twice now flying from North America via Europe to another continent, I have had to endure security checks after disembarking from the first leg of my flight.  So to recap: I go through security in Canada, get on a 7 hour flight, am not given access to my checked luggage, am not able to leave the secured area of the airport and I need to take my shoes off (maybe) and unpack my carry-on for another security check???
• Why do they sometimes let you keep going even when you set off the machine as you walk through?
• How come my laptop/toiletries can sometimes go in the bin and sometimes stay in my bag?
• More than once in both India and Nepal I was asked point blank if I was carrying weapons or explosives in my carry-on luggage.  Sometimes when I said no, they didn’t search my bag.  The question here is meant to be implicit.

Time-travel

•  I woke up Friday morning on my brother’s futon in Toronto and just under a day later am putting my head down at a guesthouse in Dar es Salaam.  Airports are a world of the unreal – sometimes the only indication that you are in a different country is the currency demanded for your extra-hot caramel macchiato.  Traveling for an extended period of time in non-descript cabins where I watch a cartoon plane circumnavigate the globe adds to the sense of the surreal.  It feels like the world is this tiny place and if we decided to, we could land anywhere. For me, this is always awe-inspiring.

•  Neutral Milk Hotel has a totally awesome song, aptly titled In the Aeroplane Over the Sea that has a lyric that I inevitably think at some point on every trip I’ve been on since hearing it.  Taken absent any context it is: “How strange it is to be anything at all” Seriously, isn’t that so true?

Truth be told, I love airports because they always hold the promise of either a new place or a familiar face, two of the best things I can think of.  That said, if you can shed any light on my experiences, I’m all ears!

Next time, a post that is actually about Dar!