Air travel. It’s an adventure. Really. Well, sort of.
Let’s just ignore the stuff you have to do to get on the plane – like the demeaning security checks, and just pick up the adventure from the moment you actually walk down the air bridge to be met by the cabin attendants.
These attractive ladies and usually one man (I travel exclusively on Asian airlines and avoid US carriers like the evil plague they are), are trained within inches of their lives to transmit a feeling of welcome, as if you are an old friend, one who owes them a lot of money, and that shoulder bag you’re lugging is packed with currency.
I have to admit it works –you weave down the aisle to your seat with the idea that at least your presence on board the aircraft is going to be amiably tolerated if not sincerely desired, and that can’t be anything but good for your self-esteem, if you have any left after the humiliating security screening. Sorry, I said we wouldn’t talk about that.
Although, compared with the US, the security check in an Asian airport is usually pretty hands-off and not intimidating (except maybe Hong Kong), and not manned by a hand-picked selection from the otherwise unemployable. Ahem.
On Cathay Pacific (where I am building a healthy mileage), Business Class is laid out in small cubicles so you can actually lie down on your own little pleasure couch. Unfortunately, after a little while this arrangement means you begin to feel like a corpse in a mortuary, or have flashes of the interior of an intergalactic body transporter, which I suppose is not far from the mark.
This state-of-the-art open-coffin ambience detracts from the sense that you are one of the elite and no longer a member of the great unwashed in economy; plus you don’t get to eyeball the pretty chick in the row beside you because the cubicles have been placed at such an angle that your eye line ends at the feet of your fellow specimen – I mean passenger – across the aisle.
My first flight was a mixed event emotionally: at first I mmm’d to myself at the seating and thought ‘Yes! I can sleep, no danger of the seat back in front of me crushing my knees because there isn’t one, a self-contained little nook. Alright! This is the way to fly!’ After I finished playing with the controls and exploring the TV system I realized I had nowhere comfortable to put my elbows and that any time I looked up for the next 12 hours I was going to be seeing the same pair of faintly grimy white socks. Hmmm. The thrill began to abate.
We got our nifty little travel kits and menus and the woman opposite – I caught enough of a glimpse that I now knew it was a woman – put on her complimentary navy blue cabin oversocks. That helped aesthetically but where, I asked, was the window so I could gaze wistfully at passing cloud formations? The window was behind me; I could look out it if I knelt on the seat in genuflection.
This transformed the open coffin mood to a state-of-the-art monk’s cell ambience. Ok then, I mused, I am in a tiny state-of-the-art monk’s cell being propelled through space… What is Cathay Pacific trying to do to my mind?
When the drink service began it changed this perception once more to that of a patient in an isolation ward at medication time. The drinks, though were good, and after enough of them you really do begin to think your excreta doesn’t smell and that you are one of the chosen, one of the mere few thousand who are flying above the planet at that moment sipping Charles Heidsieck and munching hors d’oeuvres; below you, concealed by the billowing, pink-tinged clouds are the sweating billions who labor so that you get to fly Business Class…
Unfortunately, the urge – if it should come over you at that moment – to stroll up and down the aisle, smiling expansively and conspiratorially at your peers is thwarted by the fact that you are virtually now immobilized.
To rise from your couch of pleasure you would have to place your champagne somewhere else (where?), also your plate, swivel the tv screen out of the way, remove the table cloth, fold the table – all this so you can bend your knees in order to remove your feet from the footstool. Then you would have to rotate your chair back, drop the leg rest, find a handhold that is not the coiffure of the person in the cubicle beside you, and then lever yourself upward.
By the time you could do all this without injury the urge has surely passed and you would slump despondently back on your couch and decide to keep it all to yourself.
This is really all I can find wrong with flying Business Class on Cathay Pacific. In these complaints I am probably alone; the system seems to work well for almost all of my many fellow travelers who happily snore their way across vast oceans and land masses without any apparent bother at all. Sadly the only way I have been able to sleep on an international flight was under the following conditions:
- No sleep for the preceding 24 hours
- No sleep for the preceding 36 hours
I think the underlying reason is that I still believe, deep in my soul, that flying is an adventure. Why I persist in thinking that I really don’t know. You’d think it would’ve been ground out of me by hundreds of hours seated in economy (until as a life choice I decided to upgrade myself to Business); or perhaps you’d think that the ignominy of becoming an automatic terror suspect by the act of booking a flight would have done it; or by paying top dollar just to be enclosed in a well-upholstered coffin.
But no, somehow the little thrill still revs up as I walk down the air bridge, my boarding pass quivering in my fingers, anticipating the approving smiles of total strangers. And to be completely and objectively fair, aside from a tendency to overheat the cabin to just below sauna level common to all Asian airlines, Cathay Pacific do a splendid job of hospitality – the planes (so far) are always on time; the girls are always pretty and charming; and the food and wine is always great. And they always (so far) land where they’re supposed to. Really who could ask for more?
