Why Flying Is Like Being Trapped In A Tiny Seat With 200 Strangers (And Other Miracles Of Modern Travel)

Flying on an airplane is, without question, the single most unnatural thing human beings have ever convinced themselves is normal! 

Think about it: we climb inside a metal tube the size of a small shopping centre, we strap ourselves into seats so narrow that if you inhale deeply you risk getting legally married to the person sitting next to you, and then we let people we have never met before fire this contraption into the sky at five hundred miles an hour, thirty-five thousand feet above the ground. And then we act surprised when things get weird.

 

The whole experience starts long before you get anywhere near the actual plane. First there is the airport check-in process, which has been designed specifically to test exactly how much frustration a human being can endure before they start screaming in public. You stand in a line that seems to move backwards, you hand over your documents, and the person behind the counter looks at them with an expression usually reserved for things found stuck to the bottom of a shoe. They ask you the questions they ask every single person, every single day: “Did you pack your bags yourself?” as if there is a large underground industry of strangers sneaking into our homes at night and filling our suitcases with socks and toothpaste! and “Has anyone given you anything to carry?”  to which I always want to say: “Yes, the King gave me a live badger and asked me to take it to Tenerife, is that okay?” But I never do, because I have seen what happens to people who make jokes at airport security, and it involves being taken away to a small room that smells strongly of disinfectant and regret.

 

Then you go through security, which is basically a performance art piece about taking off your clothes in front of strangers while trying not to look guilty. You remove your belt, your shoes, your jacket, your watch, your keys, your coins, your glasses, your dignity, and you put them all into plastic trays that look like they were last used to wash very large dogs. You walk through a machine that beeps if you so much as think about metal, and then a nice person in a high-vis vest wanders over and pats you down with the enthusiasm of someone searching for gold. Once you are through, you have to try and put all your belongings back on while balancing three bags and a bottle of water that cost more than my first car, surrounded by hundreds of other people doing exactly the same thing, all of us looking like we have just escaped from a facility for people who are very bad at dressing themselves.

 

Eventually you get onto the plane, where you discover that the seat you paid good money for is actually slightly smaller than the average broom cupboard. You sit down, you fold your legs into whatever space hasn’t already been claimed by the person in front leaning their seat all the way back until their head is resting gently on your dinner plate, and you wait. Then the captain comes on the loudspeaker, sounding like a man who has had four cups of coffee and very bad news, to tell you all about the weather  which you can perfectly well see out of the window  and explain that we are going to be delayed for absolutely no reason whatsoever, but “don’t worry folks, we’ll be on our way shortly!” which in airline terms means “we will be sitting here for so long you will finish reading every word of the in-flight magazine, including the advertisements for duty-free perfume you cannot afford.”

 

Before we finally take off, we are treated to the safety demonstration, which shows you exactly what to do in the unlikely event that your metal shopping centre decides it would prefer to be a submarine. They show you how to put on the life jacket, how to use the oxygen mask  “put your own mask on before helping others” which is sound advice, unless you are travelling with your children, in which case they will definitely put theirs on backwards and try to eat it before you have even found yours. Then they bring you the food, which is presented with great fanfare as “a delicious hot meal”, but which is always some kind of beige substance that tastes like cardboard that has been marinated in hot water, served alongside a roll so hard you could use it to break into the luggage hold.

 

And yet, despite all this  the squeezing, the queuing, the beige food, the fact that you spend six hours trapped next to a man who has brought his own pillow and is snoring loud enough to interfere with air traffic control  we all do it again. Because somehow, against all logic, being thirty-five thousand feet up in the sky, looking down at the world like it is made of tiny toys, is still one of the most amazing things you will ever do. 

Even if your feet do swell up to twice their normal size and you arrive looking like you have been in a fight with a vacuum cleaner. It’s magic. Just… bring your own sandwiches.