AirPain! : A Tale of Airline Travel & Why (for most of us) it Sucks!

Unless you’re a toddler who’s packed all of their toys to take on a trip, or if the only other option of transport was a Greek ferry, no one enjoys economy.  The only reason you do it is because it’s the quickest way to get from where you are to where you want to be, like standing in a crowded lift or sleeping with your boss.  And much like both of those experiences, it’ll leave you uncomfortable and disappointed.  So before you next take-off, I’ve made a few “frequent flyer points” for you to share with your friends or whichever Uber driver is unlucky enough to be picking you up at your destination.

If my travel experiences were turned into a feature film.

I’ll start by addressing the struggle of all tall people, particularly because I’ve been a member of the ‘2-metre high club’ for several years now.  The struggle being that it seems only in the case of airline travel that tall people are treated like social pariahs.  Like we’re Dorothy rocking-up to Munchkinland and no one’s quite sure how they’re going to deal with us.  At any other point in life it’s an advantage to be tall; you’re the go-to guy for reaching things off high shelves, you’re the first person picked in sports teams at recess, you can date tall girls who like to also wear high heels.  Only airlines seem to think being tall is a lifestyle choice we should have to pay extra to find leg room to cater for.  Then, as I’m considering getting a “Tall Lives Matter” t-shirt printed, the guy next to me who looks like a before photo from Subway has his love handle pouring over my arm rest, still doesn’t have to kick in extra to pay for the portion of my seat he’s occupying.  It’s not like I told my parents to conceive me during an excursion to Chernobyl.  It’s not like I just splurged on good nutrition as a child and let my height get out of hand.  I bet this is why there are so few survivors in plane crashes.  It’s because we’ve got cashed-up members of the ‘Lollipop Guild’ sitting in the exit row with their feet swinging 10cms off the ground, meanwhile I’m stuck back here between ‘Captain Coughs’ and the ‘Michelin Man’ with so little leg room I’m using my ears as noise cancelling ear muffs.

I’m not even comfortable with the fact that to get an exit seat, us “vertically endowed” individuals have to answer “yes” when a flight attendant asks “are you willing & able to assist in the unlikely event of an emergency”?  I feel like, “No!  If I’m paying for leg room, I’d like it without a side serving of overwhelming responsibility, and if having that leg room comes with extra responsibility served standard, then refund my money”.  I’m trying to pay extra to purchase some blood circulation for my legs, not for a portion of the cabin crew’s workload.  Let me put it this way; I’m not tipping a restaurant waiter to seat me at a good table, only to then have him tell me that because I have more room than other diners to slide my chair out quickly, in the event of a fire I’m going to grab a fire extinguisher and unhinge a door so others can flee the inferno.

If I had a lollipop for every time I missed out on exit seats because they were already occupied by hobbits or munchkins, I'd have both types of diabetes.

On the plus side, all this has inspired me to write a book called the “Qatarma Sutra”.  It’s going to be a book with illustrations of uncomfortable seating positions you can somehow sleep in on planes.  It’s going to a real page turner for those who are used to sitting in positions too tight for them to be able to turn the pages of their books.

Turn to page 28 for instructions on the cover art positions: (From left) "The Limbo" when travelling alone with a row to yourself, "The Detention" when travelling alone with a row full of strangers, and "The Centipede" when travelling with very close friends with whom you're sharing a row.

Even if you’re so short that you don’t worry about leg room but you get an altitude nosebleed when you have to stand on the aisle seat to put your items in the overhead locker, the in-flight experience isn’t a great one.  This is because whether your life is constantly in leg room surplus or leg room deficit, I think we can all agree that planes have become ‘high altitude hospitals’.

Now as my Arts degree reminds me constantly, I’m not a doctor.  But as far as I can tell, the main symptom of people suffering from a contagious, coughing-dominated illness is the apparently uncontrollable desire to travel.  ‘Captain Coughs’ is just another member of a select group of sick travellers we’ve all encountered on-board any flight.  A contagious platoon of unhealthy individuals whose sole mission is to make sure the horror of your flight stays with you after you land.  I call them ‘The Really Dirty Dozen’.  You’ve probably also met and flown with ‘Sergeant Sniffles’, ‘Lieutenant Loogie’, ‘Major Malady’ even ‘Deputy Disease’.  On my most recent flight, the lady next to me coughed non-stop through an episode and a half of ‘Game of Thrones’.  She coughed so hard, I’m convinced that the two characters killed off in that space of time died because they caught whatever she had.  I think if we’re confined to a room surrounded by sick people, crying children and oxygen masks where we have to share a toilet, get served bad food on small plastic trays and watch limited entertainment on a small TV screen, we should at least be able to claim it on our healthcare package.  To stop that happening, maybe airports could start replacing the security scanners with anti-bacterial showers so we can stop people bringing viruses and infections onto flights as much as we’re trying to stop them bringing on nail clippers and foreign fruits.

You will never look at another in-flight safety demonstration the same way again, especially if you leave your earphones in and only see the flight attendant's hand gestures and mouth moving while you listen to your iPod.

I think it all started to go wrong for airlines when flying became more affordable.  Remember the old movies where people would be wearing formal wear and smoking on a flight?  Most airlines early on didn’t even have a class system.  It was like every commercial aeroplane was basically a combination of socialism meets Mad Men (an idea I would be all for bringing back by the way).  Sure tickets were more expensive but that just made sure you flew with a better class of passengers.  Tullamarine Airport didn’t look like Dandenong plaza.  “Karley” and “Jaysen” from Frankston’s dream of travelling to Europe wasn’t a chance of becoming a reality and Europe would remain free of Bintang singlets.  If you look at the evolutionary chart of airline passengers, you’ll see that somehow we went from suits and summer dresses to people wearing Pikachu onesies.  Also, if you’re one of those people who seem unaware that their neck cushions can be removed at some point between customs checkpoints at departure and arrival, you are a greater threat to your own safety than any neck cramp or act of terrorism.

A theory of evolution that Darwin himself would admire.

What we need to do is change the name of each of the class sections.  I’m happy to leave 'first class' as 'first class', but 'business class' needs to be changed.  If you’re so interested in business, why do you have a TV screen, lounge chair and a glass of alcohol in your hand at midday on a Tuesday?  What is your business, full-time dole payment collector?  It should be called “leisure” class.  You want to really get some business work done, let’s swap seats.  You’ll have a seat that only reclines to a 95 degree angle, ensuring you won’t fall asleep doing that important work of yours, a toilet with a wetter seat than bowl that’ll ensure you cut down on all of those unproductive toilet breaks.  Oh, you’ve also got completely unhelpful and unfriendly flight attendants at your beck and call to ensure you rely solely on your own abilities to get your work done.

You either have so much room for activities or no room for appendages.  There is no in-between.

After all of this, how do the airlines reward us for the way we somehow muster up the resilience and muffle our dignity to put up with this treatment?  They flick us a few frequent flyer points to keep us quiet for a while like the cheap mistress we are.  “Here, take this, go by yourself something shitty”.  I say “shitty” instead of “pretty” because as we all know, frequent flyer points are brilliant… until you need to use them.  Frequent flyer points are basically the Indonesian Rupiah of airline currency - just because you see a lot of zeros before the decimal point, doesn’t mean you’re wealthy.  When you understand that, you’ll understand why your frequent flyer points are more likely to see you walking away with a key ring and rubber ball than with a flight to the Maldives.

Pretty much the only thing making us look past all of the stuff that sucks about airline travel is the altitude.  For some reason the higher the altitude, the more likely we are to glorify everything that takes place there.  I imagine it’s why everything tends to be more expensive in rooftop bars than in underground pubs, why Heaven is up and Hell is down, why Santa is from the North Pole, why the rest of Australia sits separated above Tasmania.  In the air, a TV in the back of the seat is “in-flight entertainment” but on the ground, it’s just a sign you’re sitting in the backseat of a Toyota Rav4 and neither the driver nor front seat passenger has any interest in engaging you in conversation.  In the air, they’re “flight attendants”, but on the ground they’re just “McDonald’s staff on the nightshift”.  The ‘Mile High Club’ is probably the perfect example though.  In the air, it’s the “Mile High Club”, on the ground it would just be the “Public Toilet Group”.  Think about it, anywhere between the 1960s and 1990s, if you performed a sexual act in a toilet on a plane, you were cool and a lifetime 'Mile High Club' member.  You do the exact same thing on the ground and minus the turbulence, you’re George Michael and you spend 80hrs doing community service.  That’s really the greatest achievement of airline travel; it’s convinced generations of people that the 'Mile High Club' is something they should want to become members of.  Which is brilliant considering the membership application process combines all the relaxation of sex in a public place with all the joy of sharing a small toilet cubicle with another person.

Literally the only difference between these two photos is a few thousand feet, believe it or not.

So this is for those of you who are reading this as you’re thinking about booking your next flight, for those of you using the over-priced economy WiFi on board your current flight or those of you who are up at 2:30am reading this thanks to the jet lag from a flight you just endured.  Or maybe you’re where I would most probably be, somewhere in between all of these scenarios waiting to board a flight.  Every few seconds looking-up intermittently only to see the way dozens of people are pushing through to board first, in what I can only assume is a mass synchronised moment of amnesia, where they all seem to have forgotten that it’s allocated seating!  Wherever you’re reading, hopefully you’ve laughed so much your ears popped and you were hunched over in the brace position.  Most importantly though, I hope that at least some of the CEOs of major airlines are reading this and maybe, just maybe, considering making a few changes on our behalf.  And if they decide not to, I hope they’re somewhere sitting back reading this at an uncomfortable angle, grabbing themselves a thin plastic cup as someone pours them a room temperature undersized can of anything.  Oh, and that the next time they fly, upon landing they happen to share an Uber with a Frenchman named “Peter”.

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