I have mixed feelings about flying. From someone who’s watched ‘Top Gun’ thirty-seven times (twice in French) and worked as ground crew for South African Airways, this should not be the case. I love the smell of aviation fuel on cool, dawn air. I thrill to the sound of engines at full throttle. And I swoon at the short sleeve shirts and aviator sunglasses by which even the shortest, dullest men are transformed into good-to-go heroes.
At the same time, I’m terrified. Not so much about hijackings or improvised incendiary devices created from the ingredients in someone’s Y fronts, but by the lack of control. Giving up mastery of my fate to somebody else takes some doing. I don’t like to think of myself as controlling, but it only took one trip on the back of a tandem with my husband to know that riding behind the guy with the controls and visibility isn’t how I ride best.
Seven days back from touchdown at Gatwick and I’m only just drifting back into complacency about being alive. Though I love everything about going on holiday – the packing, the hunting for passports, even the bikini shopping – flying really does bring out the worst in me. It reveals me to be irrational, over-talkative and actually, a little bit racist.
This summer, we flew Tor Air. I know - I’d never heard of them either and I have written about travel for oooh, eversuch a long time. The perturbing thing was that none of the officials at Gatwick seemed to be aware of them. “How are you spelling that?” asked the clerk at security.
“Tor, as in tor-ment or tor-por,” I said, little knowing the truth I spoke. He shook his head. “It’s not one I’ve dealt with before,” he muttered.
Of course, had I checked online beforehand I would have found acres of coverage about them. Delays, huge delays and monumental delays, seemingly down to an intermittent electrical fault. Some praise for their daring to take the first charter flights into Baghdad, some more stuff about the failure of the cabin lighting due to the intermittent electrical fault and a couple of lines about this ‘tiny fleet’ of four aircraft based in Gothenburg.
“Swedish, eh?” I said to my mother. “Probably put together from a flatpack kit with an allen key. Will the 50p hot dog and the Daim bars make an appearance, I wonder?”
“There’s no in-flight meal,” she replied, “it’s buy-on-board.” My mother has never been to Ikea. I don’t know what I was thinking of, making a quip outside her frame of reference.
So, I did the milling around Gatwick airport working the glamour in my Missoni shades and new pedicure. Anxious that the nine books I’d brought with me weren’t enough for the fortnight, I succumbed to buying more holiday reading matter in Waterstones, trying to convince myself that £18.00 for two paperbacks in their ‘buy-one-get-one-half-price’ was not unreasonable but knowing from the throb of my credit card that it totally was.
Fully loaded, I entered the tubular walkway to the aircraft. It was just as well that I didn’t see the outside of the plane as, when I finally got to examine it in the brilliant lights of Kalamata airport later on, I could still see the ghost lettering of the previous owner – Dodgy Airways or whoever – beneath the garish prime coloured Tor Air signage. Not only was I not flying first class, I was actively flying second hand!
Aboard the previously-owned aircraft, I was met by an unsmiling flight attendant leaning against the washroom door. Yes, leaning. I’m old school. I prefer my cabin crew upright and smiling like they’re auditioning for a Colgate ad, so I was immediately unnerved. There was an awful lot of inadvisable make-up knocking around too, but maybe this was down to the faulty cabin lighting that so often featured in the on-line reviews.
Once seated (those two words make it sound as though it took no time at all when in fact it was as complicated as a Krypton Factor final) I watched the floor show that was the safety briefing. For a start, the girl styling out the life jacket in front of me was wearing a skirt that had clearly been issued at the start of her career when she was twenty pounds lighter. In the event of an emergency the chances of her moving anywhere at speed where nil. Just another hidden catastrophe of the budget airline, I guess.
After a scenic tour of the airport runway possibilities, it seemed our captain picked one at random and went for it, manoeuvring stick A into position B, depressing pedal C and pulling hard on lever D. And that was it. We were committed. I closed my eyes and wished there was a god instead of a gaping vacuum filled with oppressive practices and men in long frocks.
Generally speaking, I find that the clenching of my sphincter and pelvic floor muscles during take-off is enough of a work-out to last the rest of the year. I relax nothing until the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign is switched off. The midwives would be so proud! It was a relief when the captain (or ‘der kapitten’ as he was termed) finally achieved altitude and I looked forward to his announcement.
The sound system crackled into life and ‘Kapitten Dragonoff’ introduced himself.
“Ok, so it’s game on,” he said cheerfully, “and we’re flying at something-something thousand metres!”
This is where I knew myself for a racist. I need calm English tones. I need a man called Roger or Richard or Quentin in that cockpit. I need him to describe the route, tell me that there’ll be no clear air turbulence and exhort me to have a pleasant flight. I do not need an excitable Swede including me in his real life Ace Combat Playstation game. And since when did we go metric at altitude? I’m not even metric on the ground.
I’d love to say that the rest of the flight was a dream, but it wasn’t. They announced the trolley service by informing passengers that ‘dere will be inflight refreshment wid der tea and der café and… and…”
I was hanging on for her next words but they’d clearly done a bunk. Were there Kit Kats? Paninis? Cheese and ham toasties? She flailed and splashed around in a murky pond of foreign words before finally coming up with ‘a whole loadda odder stuff.” I breathed out. My pelvic floor relaxed. Turned out it’s not just take-off that stresses me.
By the time I’d got the cup of tea and Kit Kat that I ritually buy to normalise the experience of being in the air, we’d started our descent. That’s how slow, or, if I were kinder, ‘thorough’ the trolley service was. To be honest though, I didn’t care. This was a win-win situation. I was either going to die in the final stages of Kapitten Dragonoff’s video game, tea in hand, or I was going to land intact. Either way, the Tor Air experience would be over.
Thankfully, the landing, though brutal, was without event; clearly all those touch-downs in Baghdad
funny as ever x
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