Memories of Flying

It’s difficult for some younger people to realise that it is only during the last sixty years that we have all taken to flying anywhere in large numbers. In the last few years, we have seen signs on the side of buses advertising flights to desirable places for extremely low cost. 

Nowadays we all squeeze into a large tube with wings and sit there for hours until we emerge from holes in the tube at our destination. 

My first flight was in a small propellor plane which the orchestral manager had chartered to fly us across the channel instead of taking the ferry. It was a revelation to me. The push of the acceleration against my back was exhilarating as we rose into the air. And it was over so quickly compared with the boring ferry that seemed to take ages to cross the channel. 

I claimed my next flight when I was working for the Arts Council of Great Britain. I asked whether I could fly up to Scotland for some work I had to do there instead of taking the usual train. It needed special permission but this was granted by a slightly mystified Chief Accountant. Once again I was able to see England from a propellor plane as it flew over the countryside at fairly low altitude. 

I used to take the train on my yearly trips to the French and Italian coasts but the first year I decided to go to Athens and Crete, I took the bus. It also coincided with the year that Greece and Turkey almost went to war so, because of the emergency, I was stranded for about a month before I could get a ride home. Although we had an overnight in Graz, the journey was so long and boring that, from that day on, I travelled only by plane. 

Charter flights were then in their infancy so initially I flew to Athens and took the night boat to Crete. As time went on,I managed to get direct charter flights to Iraklion and later to Hania. In those days, seating in the plane was not as cramped as it is now and the Crete airports were almost deserted. 

I travelled to Iran one Christmas by way of Amman Jordon using Jordanian Airways. It was interesting to do the “fly down” the runway before doing an 180 degree turn to land. The Iran Air plane was the latest 727 with wonderful Iranian cuisine even for economy class me. 

I am not a trusting man. In Amman on my return journey, I managed to force myself next to the exit in the bus taking us to the Jordanian plane. When the bus doors opened I rushed up the steps to get one of the last few seats available. The rest of the prospective passengers were left in Amman to await the next flight to London. The King had decided to take a trip to London so he had almost completely filled the plane with his henchmen and his household. We understood that he was actually flying the plane. 

My first transatlantic flight was to Chicago. It was also my first boring flight. Up until then, I had been excited to fly and watch the countryside below. In one trip to Crete, the pilot had called us up to the cabin to point out some migrating birds not far below our height. It had seemed so personal and exciting. The new era of mass transport was making it less enjoyable. We even went on our first ski charter where we were packed so tightly into the aircraft that it was almost impossible to breathe. The modern era of mass air transport had almost arrived. 

I say “almost arrived” because, around that time, I took a flight to Paris from the then tiny airport at Stansted for a conference in Beaubourg’s IRCAM beneath the Pompidou Centre. The plane looked like a box suspended from a pair of wings. The pilot greeted us on board while he drank from his thermos of coffee. There was one cabin staff who kept us supplied with alcohol to alleviate effects of the rough flight at low altitude. 

Shortly after our arrival, the French announced a strike of all airport staff including flight controllers. One amusing result of this was a conference of musicologists into which I popped, after the IRCAM conference had finished, for a while. There were only five academics in the conference and one of them fell asleep. They then had a vote on whether they should wake him up or not. They decided unanimously to let him sleep. 

We were on the last plane to leave CDG airport before everything closed down. Actually I had the impression that everything closed down before we left. But we were guided home by the English traffic controllers so everything worked out fine. 

I have travelled on only one propellor plane since then. It was a Berlin Air flight into Stansted. The interesting feature of the plane was that I once again felt the pressure as I was pushed back into my seat when the aircraft climbed rapidly into the sky, very different from a jet aircraft. 

When my family had emigrated to Australia, they had travelled on the Canberra cruise ship. When we travelled to Australia, we travelled by air of course. However, we could not fly on to Australia because of a strike of Air Traffic Controllers so we were stranded in the best hotel in Singapore completely paid for by Qantas. They even paid for bus tours around the area. We tried every cuisine in the hotel restaurants. Escargot and frogs legs were not normally on my menu but we tried everything.  

On arrival at Sydney airport, we changed planes as we were headed for Melbourne. Having been on the first plane into the airport, we were now on the first plane out of the airport.  We then had our first example of the typical Aussi “Sang froid”. As we headed down the runway, the plane seemed to slip on the surface until it seemed to start sliding sideways. The pilot managed to stop the plane and turn it round, saying, “We’ll try that again, shall we?”. Needly to say, the second attempt was successful. 

From Australia, we managed to circle the earth a number of times, every four years in fact. We normally had a couple of stops when crossing the Pacific at Fiji and Hawaii and just one or two stops in Singapore or Hong Kong and Dubai flying the Eastern part of the journey. There was a change when we flew in the new short Jumbo Jet across the Pacific non stop. The jet seemed to have difficulty actually getting off the ground. 

Another time, we took a French airline back from Paris on our way to Sydney. The cabin crew seemed surprised to see us and we were even more surprised to discover that the plane was full of soldiers on their way to quell a rebellion on one of “their” islands North of Australia. Our surprise was augmented by the fact that some of them were smoking. 

We obviously complained only to be told that we should not have been allowed on this flight at all. But one of the cabin crew returned soon after and told us that we would be welcome on the upper deck of the plane. We ascended the steps and found a half empty area where the Minister of Defence was holding court amongst what seemed to be a group of very important people. The Minister welcomed us and invited us to take a seat and enjoy the excellent cuisine and wines served by the cabin crew. After that, the flight was very enjoyable. 

After many more RTW flights, I found myself in living in Florence being invaded by hordes of tourists as the Summer season approached. Remembering my journeys of many years earlier, I jumped on a “red eye” flight to Athens and caught the dawn flight to Chania.

This is a lovely short flight. Heading out from a busy Athens, the plane seems to fly low over the sea until the island of Crete appears ahead. The little airport was deserted on that trip and I was able to revisit some of my old haunts on the island.

It was in a hotel in Sfakia that I met an Israeli couple who told me about a charter flight they had travelled on to Iraklion from Tel Aviv. They encouraged me to go to Israel so I found the airline and booked a flight for a week later. 

It turned out that the flight was by an airline which was the charter part of El Al, the national airline of Israel. What I was not prepared for was a long interrogation from the security service before I boarded the plane. 

“Why did you only book this flight last week?” “How did you find out about this flight?” “Why did you choose this airline?” 

I was happy to comply with their wishes for me to answer these questions. After all, their security had served them well and was in the process of serving me. The questions kept coming, “Are the people who told you about this flight here now?” Then they left me standing while three of them, including one who I guessed was the person in charge, just looked at me for over ten minutes. Finally they let me go after putting my luggage through their Xray machines a few times. I was 90 minutes late for the plane but it waited for me. I was very happy with that airline so, after my sojourn in Palestine, I used it to travel to Paris. 

By this time, there were numerous cheap airlines available to get us anywhere we wanted. I flew from Budapest to Manchester, Manchester to London then London to Seattle where we lived on an island near where Boeing constructed their planes. As we crossed to the island on a ferry, we would usually see one or two brand new planes flying low over the water to land on their air strip. 

Flying from Seattle to Sarasota was interesting. Boeing has designed special thin seats for their short haul planes and our flight from Seattle to San José was in a new 737. But our flight from St José to Atlanta was in a very old plane with comfortable seats and large spaces between each row. The flight from Atlanta to Sarasota was in a plane only 20 years old but it still had the same degree of “old fashioned” comfort. 

It seems that our new age of mass air travel has sacrificed a lot of comfort for the joy of being able to reach our holiday destinations cheaply. In Cambridge we see advertisements for flights to our favourite places for prices as low as £29.99. Our local airport Stansted, which used to be small, is now a major departure point for travellers and the other London airports are at full capacity. 

We were happy to find a cheap airline which flew new 787s to Orlando from Gatwick. Now the same airline flies to Tampa not far from our home in Sarasota. So we are even happier. It would be nice to have another way of travelling to England for the hurricane season but the repositioning cruise from Tampa to Rotterdam takes 14 days compared to flying in a large tube for nine hors. I suppose that’s why we like flying.