I am certainly not the first person to state what a miserable process travelling by civil aircraft now is, unless one happens to enjoy the use of a private jet (a growing sector thanks to ventures like this one). Even before the latest terrorism problems, the security measures put in place added to the tedium of queuing, increased the tendency of staff to be rude and highhanded towards customers, and added to the cost and expense of flying. The budget airline changes wrought by the likes of Easyjet or Ryanair in Europe certainly have been a massive bonus for anyone who likes to regularly hop over to Porto for a nice weekend or buzz down to Malta to see in the in-laws, in my case. But the fun of flying is pretty much dead. (There is, alas, a similar problem with driving cars today). Airline food is terrible. The safey procedures are a joke – I have never seen any passenger take them seriously. Delays are considerable and getting worse, simply due to the massive amounts of traffic and the lack of airport space. And finally, in places such as London’s Heathrow Airport, the place is a nightmare: noisy, dirty, resembling nothing so much as a grotty provincial shopping mall. What can be done about it?
Well, part of the problem is that airport operators like BAA, now owned by Spanish company Ferrovial, operate more or less as a monopoly. There is relatively little competition in the sector and the state regulatory body lacks the market incentive to worry about improving the comfort and enjoyment of passengers. There is something to be said in forcing a breakup of the monopoly of the main airports and encouraging more competition. I personally make it a personal mission to avoid Heathrow Airport at any cost and fly from Gatwick when it is possible, or go to a smaller airport instead. Competition is urgently needed to shake up this industry and put a bit of glamour and excitement back into the business of flying.
Glamour is not a word one hears very often about modern aviation. For all that it is fashionable to bash him (his beard and toothy grin seems to drive some folk up the wall), Sir Richard Branson tries his hardest to inject some fun into the process. But not nearly enough airport/airline operators seem to have that spirit. This industry needs a few more Howard Hughes-type characters to kick it hard up the backside. If they don’t, more and more people like me will look for any alternative to taking to the skies in the future. Airlines may think that treating people badly will make them profits, but the long-term cost in alienating people who are seeking alternative forms of transport is bad economics and bad business.
Checking some details, I came across this rather interesting site. Well worth a look.
The Prime Minister,Gordon Brown said that Britain’s message to the terrorists must be: “We will not yield, we will not be intimidated and we will not allow anyone to undermine our British way of life.”
“That is the prerogative of the Labour Government”.
>what a miserable process travelling by civil aircraft now is
How about your own MiG, then?
Anyway, on the subject of all this, I think there could perhaps be more of an incentive to fly from smaller regional airports if a number of them stopped charging ‘security’ or ‘development’ fees on top of all the other taxes paid by flyers. Adding an extra tenner or so on top of these flights would seem to me to perhaps be detrimental in some respects.
Otherwise, I’ve seen my local airport, Blackpool, grow phenomenally in popularity in recent years, right up until Brown caused a drop in traffic and Ryanair’s withdrawal of the London route because of his ‘environmental’ tax. Now the airport’s fighting to keep its routes and airlines.
Since some air fares are cheaper than train fares, it’s only natural that airports start to resemble train stations. That’s progress.
The case for a new airport on a man-made island in the Thames estuary is pretty strong even without the charge of monopoly.
If you tried to build Heathrow now they would laugh at you, considering the traffic flying right across London and the prevailing winds that send any pollution back over the metropolis.
Heathrow is a joke. Hong Kong is not. Create a Hong Kong style airport to carry sufficient traffic, similarly link it to the centre of London and strategic peripheral hubs via a high speed rail link + check in, including the superb way the rail platforms are before you at arrivals and let you swoop down to departures.
There is only one thing worse than a State-mandated private monopoly and that is a foreign-owned, State-mandated private monopoly.
The fun of flying has totally vanished
The fun of arriving remains as real as ever, however.
Mrs Thatcher had the right idea that it was a good idea to privatise state owned enterprises. Unfortunately in the UK (as in most other countries) most industries were privatised as quasi-monopolies. This suited government in that it gained the most money from privatisation and it justified a role for meddling state bureaucrats in the form of “regulators”. What would have been far better would have been to privatise industries in lots of little pieces and then let them compete with each other.
London’s airports are a great example. London has three major airports: Heathrow (around 65m passengers a year); Gatwick (30m) and Stansted (20m). They all belong to the same company. If they belonged to three different companies that were competing for airlines and passengers, I find it unimaginable that service would not be vastly better.
As to why service at Heathrow is so much worse than Hong Kong, Singapore, or Seoul, BAA tends to use the excuse that its facilities are old and tiny. Much of this excuse goes away in a couple of years when Terminal 5 – a huge and state of the art facility – comes into service. By all reports the construction companies building it are doing a wonderful job. The question that remains is whether BAA can screw things up when they start operating it. I bet they can.
Public transport is always a grim way to travel.
You are quite right that fear of terrorism (and so on) has undermined a lot of the fun in life. So much for “not allowing the terrorists to undermine our way of life…..”
In the 19th century if the Feinians planted a bomb in railway station the bodies were cleared away and people just got on with things.
Any effort to demand to search passengers would have been met with force.
These days people allow themselves to be treated like dirt – so they are treated like dirt.
When was the last time you heard someone say (to someone “in authority”) “put a hand on me, or put a hand on a lady, and I will kill you”.
That sort of Victorian attitude would be unthinkable today. And ordinary people are not allowed to carry weapons (even in the United States).
As for Sir Richard Branson – it is not his beard or his grin that I object to, it is the fact that he is a phony. His tactic is always the same – set up a company in a market (always with the name “Virgin” on it – although one “Virgin” is not responsible for another “Virgin” enterprise debt) and then pretend to be “standing up for the little people” by tossing out law suits at the other companies in the field (so that they either pay him or grant him favours – in order to stop him attacking them in the media, the government regulators, and the courts).
The case against Sky is just one example (Branson never intended to seriously discuss what price he would pay for Sky television programmes – he just made a show of talks, and then went public to try and whip up sympathy, he always acts like this, and then he went to law – the fact that the programmes are made by Sky and it shoulf not have to sell them to Branson at any price does not seem to occur to anyone).
Of course Sir Richard Branson cooperates with the “big boys” (absurd that this billionaire pretends not to be one of them) when it suits him – such as the legal action with British Airways (which he used to attack in the courts) to keep other people out of certain airports at certain times.
And then there is all the charity work.
Recently it was the pledge to give all profits to combat globel warming.
How this fitted with the previous pledges to give all profits to various other good causes, was not explained.
But, of course, if one reads the fine print it is all bullshit.
Most of the Virgin enterprises certainly do not give most (let alone all) their profits to charity.
Still at least Branson is not in the American club of dodgy billionaries.
Peter Lewis, Bill Gates, George Soros, Warren Buffet, Marc Cuban (although he may only be a multi millionare), Mrs Kerry (from Heinz) and so on. All of them can be relied upon to give to leftist political causes (as well as more normal charities – although the amount of money they announce that they give to even normal charities is greater than their total wealth, so something does not make sense).
Sometimes I think we are living in a James Bond film – a world full of communisitc billionaries.
It is all very odd. None of this people ever seem to do any work (they just go from P.R. stunt to another P.R. stunt – always appearing with the “great and the good”) and yet they have billions.
And then they announce they are giving away billions – and still have billions. And then they announce they are giving billions (the same billions they are already supposed to have given away) to something else. And they still have billions.
In some cases it is easy to find out where the money came from.
For example, and ex official of the Clinton Administration who was made head of “Fannie Mae” (government backed loans-for-property organization) and given 125 million Dollars for nothing much.
Or all the Goldman Sachs people (such as the present Governor of New Jersey) who were somehow connected with “Long Term Capital Management” the organization the Federal Reserve System decided was “too important to be allowed to collapse”
The Bill Gates MicroSoft story is well known.
Warren Buffet inherited quite a bit of money, but made a lot more by going to family owned firms where the owner was getting on and saying “when you die the Feds will destroy the business with the Death tax – but if you sell out to B.H. your children will get money in trust…” (of course he also made money advising people how to avoid the Death tax).
No wonder the man is in favour of the Death Tax.
My guess is that the others are much the same.
Arlanda is a proper airport. The security checks are reasonable and they have proper bars next to the gates. Beer is a little dear, but thems the Scandos for you. Great rail connection to Stockholm, as well.
Your nostalgia for the past is quaint, but unrealistic.
For quite some time now, completely independent of any terrorism threat, commercial airlines have been the Greyhound busses our age.
Being a pilot used to be glamorous. Stewardesses used to be sexy. Flying was somehow exotic, almost daring. Trains and busses were for the peasants. But flying out to the coast, or down to Florida, was a big deal, something to be talked about almost as much as the vacation itself.
Hawaii? Europe? The Far East? Those were fantasies for the rich, or newly weds with moneyed parents, or those funny, obnoxious retired types wearing black socks and shorts who couldn’t understand conversion rates or why they couldn’t just get a hamburger.
I can remember my mother flying down to Miami for a vacation in the ’50’s. She was a nervous wreck for days beforehand. My grandfather, who never flew in his entire over 80+ years life, thought she was nuts for not taking the train.
After she remarried, she took a cruise to South America with my step-father and a bunch of Shriners. They talked about the elegance, tuxedos, royal treatment, and, of course, the endless food.
Now, the cruise ships are monstrous cattleboats, holding thousands, like huge floating Las Vegas hotels, and just about as classy. It’s about as elegant as standing in line at Disney World to see “It’s a Small World”, but without that horrible song, which I suspect violates several Geneva conventions.
Everyone thinks there was some “golden age” in the past when things were better. Sports fans are always talking about it. Fashion buffs, car fanciers, gourmets, wine sophistcates, and the list is endless, all yearn for that time when things were so much better.
Almost every time, it turns out what is missed is exclusivity, and that certain elegance that seems to be associated with it.
Now, as millions more fly each year, and the dreary list of time consuming hurdles that must be jumped grows each time something blows up somewhere, instead of an adventure, it has become a chore.
But, just for a moment, stop and think about what it actually is that we are complaining about.
Ordinary people, with ordinary incomes and ordinary jobs and ordinary lives, can get into a machine and fly across whole continents and oceans, and visit places that generations before them had only experienced in movies, or those coveted photos from the National Geographic.
The world now belongs to the common man and woman.
I agree it has a tendency to be dreary, and certainly much of the elegance is gone, but, all in all, I can’t see that that outcome is such a bad thing.
Could it be handled better? Of course. Would competition, and less burdensome regulatory nonsense, be a benefit? Yes, I think so.
But the idea that a schoolteacher can take my daughter, and two dozen like her, on a trip to Spain for a couple of weeks for a few thousand bucks makes it bearable, for all its faults. (She can hardly wait to go back)
And so, everything you say is true, but, somehow, it doesn’t really matter. Maybe they’ll have exclusive, clean, luxurious, and less irritating, flights to resorts on the moon.
Hurry. If you wait too long, everybody will be going.
Somehow, I think this is what most people resent rather than lack of exclusivity. I have my doubts about the security benefits of quite a few of the extra control measures. But even if all the security measures are truly necessary it takes the fun out of flying or just about anything connected to it.
Plane journeys and dental treatment are two things I submit to when I absolutely have to. I find both experiences about equally entertaining.
I haven’t noticed any difference at all. Except that in the past few years the Americans have managed to reduce the terrible post-911 queues.
Flying is still flying.
I still get excited to be at 40000 feet over the Atlantic and arrive in Canada a few hours on.
As that BBC Comedienne would say:”It sounds like ‘Bwaaaa, I d’don like flying no more, muummeee!'”
If some of you guys took a plane up under your own steam(with a qualified instructor) you would soon recover the sense of excitement.
You’re moaning because the professionals are just too good at their jobs.
An enterprising company should be able to buy up an airport and dedicate it to offering an acme service for the kind of ‘non-confirmist’ know-it-alls who like to hold forth on how terrorism is a load of nonsense, and the real problem is the swingeing security measures that nasty old government subjects us to.
Passengers could sign a form saying that they wouldn’t blow up the plane (perhaps even this measure is a little draconian, but still…)
I’m sure they’d do a ‘roaring’ trade.
A good clue how we feel about airplanes these days…Airbus. Of course, having a flown on a few I know they feel like they are built like a bus as well.
I like flying and am happy to deal with all the security as long as it does the job. I am especially not going to stop as it makes the envirofascists go apopletic. Bring on the cheaper flights and more airplanes I say!
commenter, would you also be happy to see it free to exclude any passenger for whatever reason it saw fit? I mean, any reason, such as “you’ve been to Pakistan in the last 1400 years, so you cannot fly” or “your eyes are too close together, Mr President, so you cannot fly”?
This freedom to exlude would be needed, as right now airports and airlines are pretty much obliged to take anyone. You cannot throw down the challenge of no barriers while forcing the airport to take whomsoever pitches up.
If the entire Muslim community found themselves grounded until they rooted out the bearded nutbags within, you might find that they gave the subject a little more…focus. Clearly the skoolzannospitawls brigade would be up in arms protecting peoples’ right to fly. Pity they do not work as hard to protect peoples’ right to land.
I was at Heathrow last week, saying goodbye to my folks who’d been visiting.
When going through security, the first part is where there are several employees standing, who’s job it is to check that you’re ticketed for a flight, to hand out the clear plastic bags to place your weapons (ie. liquids), to check the size of your carry-on, and to tell everyone that they are allowed only one carry-on item.
They took this last part very seriously. A tiny handbag is one piece, which they won’t allow. In very serious non-empathetic tones, they would force at least 25% of passengers to squeeze their two items together. Passengers that objected that they couldn’t possibly fit their two items together were told in no uncertain terms that it wasn’t the employee’s problem, and that the passenger should go back to the desk and check their luggage in.
Objections that the airline allows two pieces of luggage (particularly bag and laptop) didn’t concern the bag nazis. _They_ only allowed one.
One customer, having trouble squeezing her nice bag into her other bigger bag, when objecting that she hadnt’ been told about this “one bag” thing, was told by the female nazi that it was printed everywhere. The passenger said “no it wasn’t”, the nazi said “yes it is”, which repeated about 6 times.
I felt dirty standing near all this, while waiting to make sure my folks left the country…..
At least I helped subvert them a bit. One girl was having a hard time trying to fit her luggage into the wire measuring thing, that the nazi told her it had to fit into. It wasn’t going to fit and she was quite upset. I waited till his back was turned, popped her bag out and told her to quickly scoot off.
I have a question – what’s with this one bag thing at security ? What’s the rationale ? I’m astounded with such a rule. It seems that it’s fine for a person to leave their home, travel all the way to the airport with their two bags, arrive at security where they have to travel 40 metres with only one bag, and are then allowed on the plane with 2 bags again.
Pietr,
I am pleased to hear that airport security in the US appears to have become more efficient. My experiences, and those I tend to hear about from others here in Europe, give me the impression that the security screening is gradually becoming more cumbersome.
You seem to assume, not only that your personal experience is shared by everybody else, but also that others in this comment threat systematically misperceive performance improvements as deteriorations. A very unusual set of assumptions leading to the surreal conclusion that “You’re moaning because the professionals are just too good at their jobs.“ This line of reasoning –if reasoning is the right word- neatly, if unintentionally, illustrates the dangers of over-reliance on induction.
Commenter,
You may have noticed that the usefulness of the security measures taken is not really the main topic here. Some measures –like banning nail clips from hand-luggage- are clearly nonsense. Others –like x-raying shoes- are a nuisance but make sense. Criticising details of security measures is not the same as rejecting security checks outright.
As for your, and TimC’s, proposal: I am sure there would be some takers for a low security airline. There are people who base-jump in any weather(Link) after all. Wouldn’t the problem then be that the risk isn’t confined to those who choose to board the plane?
Ranting-I don’t mean the security drones when I talk of professionals-I mean the people who get you up and off in your massive, amazing aeroplane.
I’m sorry to hear that the US is getting worse again; I only flew once this year, and it was very easy, over from Leeds to Amsterdam.
Didn’t even need a ticket.
It is true that sometimes one sees the past through rose coloured glasses, but sometimes things have got worse.
One should remember the old Russian saying “first they smash your face in, and then they say you were always ugly”.
For example, airlines did not use to keep people in the aircraft, on the ground, for as long as ten hours. Now they can quote a government regulation (passed after 9/11) saying that noone may leave.
This is common law false imprisonment.
As for Comrade Branson:
His latest con now seems clear.
The biggest ad campaign I have even seen (that for Virgin Media – all over the internet, the sides of buses and so on) seems, by proping up numbers of people on the Virgin system, to have conned a big American private equity group into offering about five and half billion Pounds for the company.
Of course this ad campaign (and the special offers and so on) can not be sustained. But Sir Richard will not be hit – he will be off with his share of the take over money.
For once, I actually feel quite warm towards the old con man. If an private equity group is stupid enough to pay five and half billion Pounds for Virgin Media they deserve all the trouble they will get.
I hope this doesn’t signal the start of the demise of the package holiday. If so – chavs please go to Cornwall and fill up the holiday lets but please don’t start driving to France for holidays.
I couldn’t bear it.
El Al does it all the time. Their approach to screening is to keep suspect people off of their planes to begin with. In my opinion, it’s a more-sound method than this happy horseshit about banning liquids, which will do nothing against the next threat. And they’re not bashful about giving out steak knives with the meal service.
I wouldn’t waste too much ear on American AT/CT officials on hijacking prevention. We’re not the only country to have faced significant terror threats in recent decades, but I note that British Airways and El Al have had far fewer of these problems.
Rantingkraut: If the bad guys can’t take over the cockpit, it doesn’t matter what happens in the passenger spaces. As long as the pilot isn’t rogue himself, the plane will land where it’s meant to land.
Well considering the NHS can’t keep jihadi doctors out, I hope airlines will do a better job at looking into potential pilots.
I used to fly very frequently but now it’s only twice a week, but it feels like twice that. But there are ways of avoiding the horrors of flying – getting a decent frequent flyer status is one. I had a gold BA and Lufthansa card for years, but now they have all gone and I really notice the difference, especially in Heathrow, which is a true hellhole. The behaviour of the security staff can vary enormously – they are mostly doing a pretty thankless and unrelentingly tedious job for peanuts, but sometimes they can let on that they are in fact going through the motions. It’s hard to know whether they have a view whether the biggest nutjobs are the Ministry of Transport wonks who come up with the measures or the moonbats who want to blow us up. I sometimes think Gilette and the BAA have a kind of vertical integration recycle thing going. Flying to Singapore first class can be “fun” – commuting to Frankfurt isn’t, but it is still a huge improvement on taking the train, or driving, or indeed having to stay in the UK for 7 days a week.
The limitations on one bag is not of the airlines’ doing, but is a UK government sponsored bit of stupidity; you have no equivalent restriction travelling to the country. I always assumed it was supposed to speed up the security check, but actually it now provides additional opportunities for Heathrow to lose bags and additional excuses not to hire the needed number of staff.
I am told I have got the American private equity group all wrong.
The fact that Virgin Media has a six billion Pound debt, has lost a lot of subscibers (in spite of the biggest ad campaign in history) and is making losses is all a GOOD THING.
“Think of the tax write off Paul”.
This reminds me that I do not understand business.
So logically the airline to buy is one with vast debts, that makes big losses, and whose few remaining customers are kept locked in the aircraft on the ground for the best part of a day – and (if the aircraft eventually takes off) stand a good chance of crashing and being killed.
Now it is all clear to me.