The Airline Sector - Opportunity Cloaked in Crisis...
Clive Maund, July 24th, 2008
Maund: Airlines & Oil Page 1
The old timers amongst you reading this whose memory hasn't failed will be able to remember when air travel was an enjoyable experience. The "butterflies in the stomach" before each flight were occasioned by awareness of the chance that the aircraft could suddenly plummet to earth and explode in a ball of flames and this gave an edge of excitement to each trip, which was enhanced by the fact that the flights taking off before yours would make the entire Terminal building shake. Planes in the old days were noisy and smoky - you could wave goodbye to loved ones taking off for a long time because they made a long trail of brown smoke, except in Britain where they would rise straight into a leaden overcast.
Partly in order to avoid thinking about the 6 miles or so of air beneath their seats, passengers would strike up conversations and learn interesting things from fellow passengers and many friendships were born - and sometimes people found their partners this way. There were films on a big screen, which although the earpieces made your ears hurt it didn`t really matter because you couldn`t hear much anyway, so many passengers preferred to chat with their neighbours or even look out of the window. Nowadays if you try to strike up a conversation with a fellow passenger you are often regarded as at best a nuisance and a distraction and at worst as an eccentric or even a pervert on the prowl. Everyone sits staring cross-eyed at a postage stamp sized screen at the end of their nose, mounted on the back of the seat in front - you can always tell the first and executive class passengers getting off a long flight because they are the ones with their eyes more parallel, because their screens were twice as far away. In the old days there was something special about going first class but nowadays you find the same slobs in jeans and sneakers sticking their feet all over everything as on the rest of the plane, and the entire plane looks like a disaster area when everyone gets off.
In some respects there is very little to show for 30 years of "progress". Planes go no faster than they did 30 years ago - slower in fact if you consider that the option to go on Concorde no longer exists. Concorde was incredibly noisy and burned a huge amount of fuel, approximately 1 ton per passenger on a flight from London to New York, but that didn`t matter to wealthy folks unconcerned about their carbon footprint - they got where they were going faster and that`s what mattered to them. Despite all the attention to detail that you hear about, aircraft windows are still small, uncomfortable to look out of for a tall person for any period of time, often scratched, dirty and/or misted up or frosted up and never cleaned between flights, exactly as they were 30 years ago - how's that for progress? Even where real progress has been achieved at huge cost - the double beds available on the new Airbus super jumbo, Singapore Airlines had to spoil it by telling couples to "behave themselves" because someone might hear.
The increasing affordability of air travel for the masses over the years has led to massive growth in passenger numbers that has led to airports becoming like cities, and the sheer volume of passengers has resulted in an inevitable decline in service, but it was the events of September 11th 2001 that provided the perfect excuse for bureaucrats and busybodies to make air travellers' lives a misery, particularly in the United States. In the old days you could almost take a machine gun on board as hand luggage, provided it wasn't loaded. Now you have to put up with long lines, take your shoes off and have strange men wearing plastic gloves picking their way through your luggage, in addition to photos, fingerprinting and intimate searches. In the US millions or more probably billions of passenger hours are wasted annually by all this, when the reality is that you are more likely to be struck by lightning than caught up in a terrorist incident. There is a more sinister aspect to these supposedly necessary security measures, which is that this kind of treatment is a way of training people for total submission to the power of the State.
