Peter Viney's Blog

A rant.

I don’t remember the glory days of flying – silver service, fine linen. A friend whose father was a pilot for BOAC flew first class in the 60s and told me all about it, but by my first commercial flight in 1971, things had changed.  

They’ve kept changing. Some tried to preserve quality … British Caledonian advertised “metal cutlery” long after every airline changed to plastic. At one point, Virgin Atlantic went absurd on its upper class menus offering pheasant in brandy and cream sauce with heavy red wines. At 36,000 feet that’s serious indigestion. Then Richard Branson had his Virgin Atlantic ‘air hostesses’ dressed in red with tight skirts and high-heeled shoes in the early days, which can’t have been comfortable on long haul.

The one thing that did improve massively in the last three decades was the semi-beds in Business and First class.

I can even remember when there were air hostesses and air stewards … the dolls at Vienna surprised me … I though the words were long gone:

I flew many times a year from the late 70s to around 2010. Then we cut down, but still visited our son in the USA regularly.

Along came Covid. We hadn’t flown since late 2018, skipped 2019 altogether and had travel plans to the USA and Canada for 2020. It didn’t happen, so September 2022 sees us back in the air for the first time, on an Economy flight to Vienna on Austrian Airlines. We chose Austrian because a British Airways employee told us quietly that BA was so screwed having sacked so many people, that they were best avoided.

GOING OUT

It’s with a critical eye that we approach it. Heathrow Terminal 2 was uncrowded and easy. We had checked in online, had paper boarding passes printed at home and went straight to bag drop, with an actual person. Our paper passes were replaced with card passes.The thought came, so why did we print paper passes at home?

Security was easy enough too, except for my knee replacement setting off the scanners, which meant standing with arms outstretched by a body scanner then checking my shoes and knee area with a hand scanner. Shoes off too to be hand scanned. Odd. They could have checked my knees right away, as I’d told them. The other thing is we filmed at Bristol Airport in 1990, and from the security side, the scanner had two lights on a drawing of a figure,  one on the groin (it looks amusing when it comes on) and one on the head. They simply indicate by flashing red where the metal is, above or below the waist. Doesn’t that work anymore? Still, there were polite security staff at Heathrow, though I don’t look forward to our next US trip where security staff in recent years default to bossy and surly.

Class For days we got imploring emails from Austrian. First they wanted us to bid in an auction for a Business upgrade. Then they offered to do it for 100 euros (each I suppose). The flight is 1 hour 50 minutes. The vaunted upgrade meant boarding 5 minutes earlier, an empty seat next to you and a ‘meal.’ The plane has three seats aside, six across. The empty seat meant they didn’t fill the middle seats rather than getting better seats, I guess (though it looked full as we walked through). I can go 1 hour 50 minutes without a meal. We had no interest.

Boarding. Not competent, I thought. Nowadays, any baggage in the hold is charged. In the USA, this means, as my son pointed out, everyone boarding with mountains of hand luggage, three or four times as much as the lockers can take. Fortunately, I think the British and Austrians are more prepared to pay to put suitcases in the hold, so it’s not such a problem. 

I can’t recall flying when any non-budget airline charged for:

• Luggage in the hold
• Pre-reserving seats
• Seats at multiple rates on proximity to emergency exits (extra leg room) or nearer the front (though Virgin and BA were charging for extra leg room by 2014, if not earlier, but that was long haul, where £25 to £50 for extra leg room is worth it)
• 3,50 euros for tea.
• Allegedly, some UK budget airlines charge a pound a pee, for using the toilet.
• Certainly some budget airlines now charge extra for ‘seats together’ and place couples who decline to pay as far away from each other as possible. 

On boarding … we noted with amusement that card passes go into the machine, click, come out, on you go. The phone passes need the QR codes scanned … and people can’t find the digital pass, and the scanner needs several goes to work. As it happened most in our line had card passes, most in the other had Smartphone passes. Our line went through vastly faster.

Our Boarding Passes were labelled “Group 4” and a sign indicated that Groups 3, 4, 5 were Economy, and 1 and 2 were Business / Priority. They boarded all the business in one lot, then all the Economy in one lot, ignoring the “group.” Group boarding was a strict British Airways speciality. It works, because you board the back of Economy, then the middle, then the front, and finally Business. You persuade Business that their extra 10 minutes in the lounge is a bonus. I’m good at getting near the front on boarding, and we were in Row 10 on an Airbus A 320. Trouble is, as we boarded, everyone in business class was blocking the aisles manoeuvring their extra hand baggage allowance into the overhead lockers. So we froze and waited. Then we moved on to Row 10, then we blocked the aisle while putting our normal hand baggage allowance in the lockers. So it continued. With the BA “strict discipline” boarding they could have boarded in half the time.

It reminded me of a BA flight from Italy to London. The rain was torrential. We went out in a bus to the plane. The attendant announced in Italian, then in English, that we would be boarding in groups by row. The doors opened and all the Italians raced out together to stand on the steps in the downpour, getting drenched. We waited in the bus until there was a clear run – we all had seat reservations.

In my days of flights paid for by publishers, we got Business Class (quite rightly) over five hours.It was fair. I’ve flown to Hong Kong, got off the plane and gone straight to give a talk before going to a hotel. If you fly to a conference, and speak the next day, you need business class. You can’t spend a day or two acclimatising. Then the publisher got a new and short managing director who deemed that everyone should fly economy … as I said, he never had to give a talk to large numbers when he got there. Because his predecessor had Karen and I on the Business Class list, we really lost out. They booked us for a long tour of Thailand. We agreed, put it in the diary. Then when he found we were on the Business Class list, they phoned and said they were sending authors on the “Economy” list instead. So be it.

It was normal to board last in Business Class, and wait in the lounges an extra twenty minutes, while what flight attendants call “cattle class” were boarding. Then they’d call and you’d stroll from the lounges. Back in 1980 I was inJapan with the MD of OUP, a man who opened all the Far East business in the 1940s. He suggested we have a drink before boarding. ‘They are boarding,’ I said. ‘Nonsense. They’ll call us when they want us,’ he replied. We had a convivial drink, then the tannoy asked us by name to go to the plane. We strolled on.He was the most experienced business traveller I ever met.

ARRIVAL

The ignominy of joining the “other passports” line in Vienna. I have a new blue passport, Karen has a red EU passport. As I carry them in my jacket pocket in the airport, it did have the advantage of not having to open the passport to see which was which.

The line moved fast. The border guard said ‘Brexit passport’ and gave my blue passport a very hefty passport stamp. I quickly said, ‘Well, I voted Remain,’ and a chorus broke out from the line behind me … Me too / So did I / We all voted Remain.

Bags. Fast. Our luggage was coming up without a wait. How to get to our hotel? A line of desks with ‘FIXED PRICE TAXI’ – we went to one. They signalled a driver. We were off. Large comfortable Mercedes too.

COMING BACK

We arrived at Vienna Terminal 3 with my nerves shattered. The fixed price driver back had a Toyota Prius, and hit 161 kph on the motorway – that’s 100 mph. He was also just one car length from the car in front. It was Sunday at 09.30, so he could. I understand motorway speed in Germany (and presumably Austria) is way faster than the UK, but my dad was a driving instructor in the army in 1946. He always said that a car is dangerous near its top speed because you should have two options in case of trouble ahead … brake or accelerate round. A Prius is stretched at 100 mph (top speed 110).  It’s dangerous.  We discussed this with our taxi driver back to Poole, who had a BMW 535. He agreed absolutely … 100 mph is safe (enough) in a BMW 535 (top speed is 146 mph), which still has powerful acceleration at that speed and brakes and tyres to match, but said it was madness in a Toyota Prius, and he’d driven them. The driving distance from the car in front was insane. When I did a driver awareness day, I was the only one who rated the distance correct every time on the video. I could go into tyre price and quality and speed rating too.

Vienna Terminal 3 is Austrian Airlines only. I imagine that London’s Terminal 5, which is British Airways only, will now be the same. Because there’s only one airline, they can automate totally. On looking back, that was the advantage of London’s Terminal 2 with multiple airlines. They couldn’t do it.

We got our boarding passes digitally the day before. Because we had just one booking reference for both of us, only I was e-mailed, and both passes therefore downloaded to my phone. No one has thought this one through. It’s dumb.

So first you have to go to a machine, switch it to English and print your own baggage label. Out it comes in a long strip. Fortunately we had asked a girl working there if there was any other check- in and she’d said ‘no.’ but she had also commiserated on the loss of ‘our Queen’ so we asked where she was from. Tanzania. We chatted a little. We stood, feeling very old, trying to peel off the ‘luggage receipt bit’ and wondering what to stick it on – normally they stick it on the paper boarding pass. Then there was the question of competence at connecting the strip on our luggage (it’s much looser under this system with a far bigger loop). Fortunately, our lovely Tanzanian helper ran over and attached it for us.

So one hurdle out of the way. Next the fully automated baggage drop with hand scanner. Scan your own tag. Off our luggage trundled. Would we ever see it again?

We went to Wolfgang Puck for brunch to recover –  they’re all over the USA. Great service, and we had Sashushka, which you don’t often see on breakfast menus. (Note: eggs were overdone though!)

Then security, where the stupidity of the Smartphone with both passes became apparent. I had to scan  it, go through the gate then pass my iPhone to the gate guard who then had to hand it across to Karen, but of course, the guard touched the screen on the way, so Karen had to put in my code and find the digital Apple wallet, then the pass, and scroll from mine to hers.

This would be repeated at the boarding gate.

Security check was not pleasant. Again my knees set off the scanner. So I got a very thorough hand pat down. It was much more intimate than was necessary- I don’t have metal testicles nor metal concealed in my buttock crease, ample though it has become. Then they had a foot scanner (much easier than removing shoes at Heathrow). The last hand pat down I had was in Japan, where it was a sweet, respectful young woman, which was mildly embarrassing, but at least gentle and considerably less intimate.

Knee replacements and hip replacements are so common at my age that you’d think they could take your word and hand scan your knees. On more than necessary, I remember being called out after the scan in Orlando, Florida and being instructed to go to the booth – this was shortly after 9/11 (We were flying this time on 9/11/22 too!). Thoughts of rubber gloves spring to mind.  The security guard said ‘Sit down’. Then he said I was the nominal middle-aged white male. He said they had so much trouble over ‘profiling’ that they had to prove their impartiality by selecting some older white men. I was their older white man. I said I understood and stood up to be searched. ‘Oh, no, sir. I’m surely not going to search you. I can see you’re not the type. Just stay in here for two minutes. So where are you from?’ We had a chat, then  I asked if he wanted me to limp on tip toe when I left the booth, and he had a good laugh. ‘That won’t be necessary, sir.’ (Orlando border guards are invariably friendlier than anywhere else in the USA. I suspect DisneyWorld dictates they be nice to tourists).

Excellent shops at Vienna Terminal 3. We got a Playmobil Mozart figure and a bottle of water. As at Heathrow “Duty Free” for alcohol means “Quite a bit more expensive than supermarket prices with full duty on.” We had to show our boarding pass to be allowed to buy a 1.90 euro small bottle of water. Same at Heathrow. Apparently it’s “duty free” though I’d pay about that for six in a supermarket. 

I was shocked to find that Heinemann were running the duty free shop. I’ve been published by Heinemann! This is appalling, I thought. Still, there must be more profit in selling water at 1.90 euros than copies of my book, Basic Survival.

From Vienna …

The flight back was packed, every seat taken – the same boarding / overhead locker chaos ensued. I don’t think a plastic cup of water and a chocolate is what I’d call in flight service, but it was less than two hours.

Baggage at Heathrow. 

This was tense. The priority business class bags came up, then a fifteen minute wait with nothing. My bag then came up near the start of Economy, Karen’s near the end, There was such a long time gap that we were mentally preparing our insurance claim. Mine had water on it (the only one). At least I hope it was water. I took the photo in case it turned out to be damaging to the case. It wasn’t.

It may not worry some people but I lost two cases altogether in my frequent flier days, and had at least three misdirected and arrive 24 hours later. I lost a case with all my then three year old daughter’s birthday presents on an Iberia flight back from Spain in the early eighties. I was arriving back on her birthday, and that’s the one that made me angriest.

Then in Rome, everyone’s cases came up but not mine. It was a hard Samsonite case (I was travelling a lot).  I waited and listened to hammering and cursing below. Eventually, five minutes after all the others, it emerged with screwdrivers hammered into each of the locks, which had held, though one screwdriver had broken in half. I went over to Alitalia, and asked what they were going to do about it. ‘Nothing,’ I was told. If they even remarked on it, the entire airport baggage handling would shut down on strike. ‘Anyway,’ they added, ‘This is what happens if you travel with expensive luggage. It’s your fault.’ It was insured, and I got a new suitcase from my travel insurance. The replacement was the one that got “lost” on the Iberia flight.

Incidentally, Heathrow was always as bad. It’s said that an outgoing luggage tag sold for £10 at the pubs around Heathrow, to those who found it interesting that people were away from home for two weeks. I only put my name and mobile number outside my baggage.

OVERALL … flying is much, much shittier than it was twenty years ago. The automatic systems are NOT an improvement. The Smartphone passes are a very bad idea. Oddly, they work perfectly easily at the theatre and cinema. I was going to take a photo of our smartphone return pass next to our card outgoing pass, but as soon as I opened it, it self destructed, being out of date. That’s smart. There is nothing enjoyable, or entertaining or exciting about the flight.

On the other hand, it was much easier than I had feared from all the tales of mountains of lost baggage, long queues and cancelled flights in the news.