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Flying lessons
by Amanda Spratt
From coping with jet lag to saving money – and dignity – we’ve asked pilots and frequent flyers how passengers can get the most from their trip.
Michael Furniss’s first job as a pilot was flying a winged tin can around Portuguese East Africa: the passengers were given food from a Thermos, the trip would take days and the pilot had to share a hotel room with the first officer.
It was primitive, says Furniss, yet still gracious.
US pilot Patrick Smith still remembers when, not that long ago, his father put on his best suit if he was flying anywhere.
As a teenager, Mark Rammell, president of New Zealand Air Line Pilots’ Association (NZALPA) would stand on the end of the runway at Wellington Aerodrome at midnight every Friday, to watch for the DC8 to fly in from Australia.
Flying, says Rammell, is one part science, one part miracle.
But now, says Furniss, the miracle is whether you’ll avoid the seat next to the toilets, if you’ll get through security without having to disrobe and whether your bags arrive at the same place you do.
“There’s no hint of graciousness left in the industry,” says Furniss. “The airlines jam 450 people on an aircraft, giving you a seat for an anorexic dwarf next to Olaf the Obese on one side and his sister on the other.”
Given our isolation, Kiwis have little choice but to fly. And we do: in the year ending June 2007, almost two million of us, or half the population, left on an overseas-bound jet plane. New Zealanders also spend, on average, more hours in the confinement of an aluminium tube than any other nation, to get to their final destination.
But it is possible to make flying more comfortable, say those who should know best – the pilots. And, from coping with jet lag to surviving a plane crash, we’ve asked them, and a few frequent flyers, to tell us how.
Furniss feels so strongly about the matter that he wrote a book, Arrive Alive, about how to make the experience “less painful, by fair means or foul”.
After flying for 40 years and teaching other pilots, he still enjoys the experience, despite the irate passengers and screaming children – Furniss says that his first daughter had 50,000 miles to her name before she turned one, many of them under the influence of a mild antihistamine.
If people knew why things were done in a certain way, says Furniss, they might be less inclined to grumble. A plane might be delayed, he says, because the pilots have realised a storm is looming, and they need time to work out a different route and an adequate fuel level.
More honesty might be a good thing, says Smith: airlines aren’t as evil as people think, but their “fortress mentality” serves only to make people more suspicious.
Sometimes, of course, passengers can be told too much.
Last year in Auckland, Jeremy Moon, who flies 300,000km a year as head of adventure clothing company Icebreaker, was delayed due to “an engineering issue”.
After an hour, he recalls, the airline announced they had solved the problem and were just waiting for the epoxy to harden.
“At that, a rather large American woman shrieked, ‘Oh, my God, they’re glueing the plane together.’ She set off a mild panic among the 20 other brightly clothed members of her tour party, some of whom refused to get back on board.”
Ignorance, says Moon, can be bliss.
Of all the trials of modern flight, especially since 9/11, security measures are probably the most trying. Take the case of Nura Abdulle. Several months ago the 70-year-old Somalian refugee, who now lives in New Zealand, set out to fly to Australia with her daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
She never made it. A diabetic, Abdulle carried fruit in her bag to snack on when her blood sugar was low, and a knife to cut it with.
Unable to speak much English, she was arrested and charged for trying to take a weapon onto the plane: she claims she was unaware of the regulations.
Neither police nor the defence can comment on the case, as Abdulle is to appear before the High Court next week, but rules, they say, are rules.
And those rules, says Smith, who writes an online column called “Ask the Pilot”, are “ridiculous”.
“The idea that by banning scissors nobody’s going to get a sharp object on the plane is just preposterous. You can sneak a sharpened piece of plastic on and it’s just as deadly as a piece of metal.”
The ban on liquids and gases over 100ml (LAGS) is equally nonsensical, says Smith.
It is “extremely unlikely” that terrorists will attempt an event like 9/11 again, but that’s what 90 percent of security measures are preventing.
“People might feel safer doing it, but where’s the feeling of ease when you’re standing in a line sweating, angry and frustrated for half an hour? If anything, I think it probably does more harm than good by ticking off people.”
Cabin crew have reported more cases of flight rage in recent years and last month an Australian pilot flew off the handle and refused to go through screening here.
Mark Everitt, who heads Avsec, the organisation charged with ensuring aviation security, understands why people get frustrated.
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