Air travel used to be heavenly. Now it’s a descent into hell.
When I imagine hell, it is not a place of brimstone and fire, it is an eternal, winding walk through an international airport, surrounded by luxury brands and a departure gate which gets further away the faster you walk. I loathe airports. I loathe their inconvenience, their brightness, their hugeness, but most of all because they didn’t used to be like this.
It has been soundly lampooned by Monty Python, Carry On, and the rest, but the first years of post-war holidays to Italy, Spain or Greece were a joy. For the first time, ordinary people could enjoy hot sun and warm water without having to fight Nazis. I first went to Majorca, back then pronounced with a very firm J, in 1969. Spain, until 1975, was a fascist state, but thousands of Brits didn’t seem to mind. Over the next ten years my parents took me to a string of Mediterranean resorts across the Balearics, Italy, and Spain for the ritualistic family holiday.
If the sea meant the Irish Sea, North Sea or English Channel, and the beach meant pebbles, wind breaks and donkeys, you can see why the warm lapping Med and the sandy Costas were so popular. Even before the EEC sorted out the sewage problem, and swimming meant avoiding turds with seaweed growing off them, it was still better than Scarborough. And crucially, the airport was the gateway to this paradise. It was part of the escape route from Ted Heath, dehydrated food, and beige. The cultural impact was huge. People learned the words ‘sombrero’ and ‘castanets’. For the first time People ate paella, moussaka, and squid. The reason the Spanish waiter Manuel was a hit in Fawlty Towers was because we’d already met him, on holiday at the Cala D’or or Hotel Casablanca.
Because my father, ex-RAF, was an air traffic controller at West Drayton, he seemed to belong to some kind of club whereby the aircrew would all be especially nice. This included a trip for me to the cockpit to meet the pilots and gaze in wonder at the array of lights and switches. Remember this was all analogue. Computers weighed more than the plane. I don’t believe small boys and girls are allowed in the cockpit any more, since the people flying the planes sit behind locked doors for fear of hijack. Stewardesses were goddesses exuding glamour and Charlie by Lentherik. The food was a marvel. Little plastic trays with compartments. This was before MacDonald’s popularised plate-free fast finger food. There was no air-rage, no drunk passengers, no-one being dragged down the gangway in plastic handcuffs.
Duty Free was a place where you could buy alcohol and cigarettes cheaper than anywhere else, apart from the back of a Ford Transit in the car park of the Crown & Anchor. There was a genuine incentive to go there. My parents would buy a Nebuchadnezzar of Gordon’s Gin or whatever, because it saved them money. Also, although neither of them smoked, they would buy cigarettes in units of 200. In those days, of course, you could smoke them on the plane, although my parents didn’t. Instead the slabs of gold Benson & Hedges and silver Lambert & Butler would go on top of the wardrobe in their bedroom like ingots of, well, gold and silver. I am sure the pulsating glow of the cigarettes’ lustrous packaging atop the forbidden wardrobe of secret delights in no way contributed to my teenage smoking habit.
I guess in the 1980s the idea of an airport as a place to procure luxury goods took off, when Thatcherism turned buying things to eat and wear into a national pastime. Aged 17, some friends and I drove to Heathrow at midnight because we’d heard the bars and shops were open all night. They weren’t. There was an elderly Sikh man sweeping the floor. We went to the photo booth and took four pictures of all of us jostling for position. This was the selfie of those far-off times. One of us is a success in the music business. One of us is dead, but that’s another story. We drove home hungry, sober and without a Rolex.
In the 1970s, you would no more turn up two hours early for an international flight than you would turn up two hours early to Kings Cross for a train to York. The idea that the palaver of going through security would take longer than the actual flight would have been laughed out of court. I don’t remember any security at all. No taking off shoes, x-ray scanners, grey plastic trays on rollers, or being patted down like a suspect in Starsky & Hutch. There must have been a moment when we waved our midnight blue passports with Her Britannic Majesty’s command to allow the bearer to go wherever they damn well pleased. But no armies of security staff shouting ‘please remove all laptops’ at us. No wonder unemployment hit a million. The airport had more passengers than staff, not the reverse.
Then the Palestinians, Japanese Red Army or Kashmiri separatists started hijacking planes and blowing them up and spoiled it for everyone. People started to make jokes about ‘take me to Cuba’ before jokes were banned on international flights. After 9/11 ‘airport style security’ became a thing, synonymous with long queues, sartorial humiliation, and a nagging feeling that somehow Al-Qaeda would mark this up as a success.
And airports became what they are today: echoing, soulless shopping arcades for the wealthy, coupled with endless queuing and having to take you clothes off in public. A place to suffer before flying somewhere better. I’ve been through most international airports and they’re all as ghastly. Arriving at Jomo Kenyatta or Julius Nyerere International Airports you have the added frisson that if you’ve lost your yellow certificate of inoculations, they take you into a side room and stick a needle in you.
But the European ones drive me to tearful despair and irrational anger, so much so that once at Frankfurt I came within an inch of incarceration for shouting at police officers. The exception is Tallinn, where the Estonians have realised people want comfy sofas and decent WiFi, not Jamie’s Italian and Swatches, and the layout suggests a series of friendly drawing rooms, not a death march through Harvey Nichols.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about airports is that the only way to get to the gate is through a meandering walkway through the ‘duty free’. They actually force you to go shopping. I know that if no one bought luxury watches at airports, they wouldn’t sell them. But, seriously, who has the impulse to buy a Mont Blanc pen, an Aspinall wallet, or Victoria’s Secret undergarments before boarding a plane? Why would you invest in diamond jewellery before venturing into environments where you are much more likely to have it stolen? I have no answer.
One day, when we we’ve fixed all the grievances and hate in the world, and we realise a comfy lounge is better than discounted perfume, we will return to a gentler romantic age of air travel. We will remember when air travel was delightful and convenient, not a descent into Hades. But for now, that flight of fancy is indefinitely delayed.
