Durban - Unless you’re one of those lucky bastards who get to fly business class everywhere, flying with commercial airlines is rarely a pleasant experience. I hate flying for the same reason I hate taking the bus or minibus taxi, I don’t like being packed in like a sardine.
A short haul locally to Joburg or Cape Town is bearable but the moment you start talking about intercontinental travel, it’s a whole different story. With increasing oil prices, competition and the drive for profitability, it’s expected that airlines would find ways to cut costs/make more money and for a time I had suspected that the seats in economy were getting smaller and smaller. This was confirmed by news stories that recently broke regarding airlines doing exactly that – reducing the width of seats to fit extra bums in the cabin. Airlines flying Boeing aircraft are now fitting nine and 10 seats across the cabin as opposed to the more comfortable eight that passengers were previously accustomed to. This has been achieved by reducing the width of seats to under the 17 inches (43cm) that the industry agreed upon in the 1950s.
Take into consideration that the average arse in the Western world has grown an inch in width since the 1960s, smaller seats is definitely not the direction airlines should be going.
Airbus seemed to take the “moral high ground” in calling for an industry standard of 18 inches, citing a study by the London Sleep Centre that says an extra inch of width in the seat would result in just over 50 percent better sleep. I’m not sure about that. From personal experience, the only thing that helps with better sleep in economy class is a sleeping pill. Period.
I remember my dad recently being quite excited when I told him that I would be flying on the new Airbus A380. “That’s going to be great,” he said. “It’s the big plane.”
As he is not a frequent traveller, I was quick to point out to him that a bigger plane doesn’t mean more room; it just means more space to shove people. And boy, was I right. I think we fail to acknowledge the “bus” in Airbus. Because that’s essentially what you’re boarding, a flying Greyhound with slightly better entertainment choices.
Let me also just say that while people rave about certain airlines from the Middle East, when it comes to economy class it makes no difference. The philosophy is the same. Pack them in tight.
So, here I was on a 16-hour flight squashed between two people. The one’s elbow rested in my ribcage for most of the 16 hours while the other guy’s belly was on my right armrest, meaning I had no armrest for much of the journey until I decided at some point, “to hell with it, I’ll use his belly as my armrest”.
Thankfully he was cool with it. Not that he really had a choice.
I seldom bother to adjust my seat into the reclined position. What a pointless exercise. To say that airline seats recline is the exaggeration of all exaggerations. They barely move.
On my return flight I managed to get an aisle seat. In my mind they’re the lesser evil in economy class. You’ve got a bit more space to manoeuvre your limbs and if you are long-legged like me, it makes a world of difference because sometimes you can just throw both legs into the aisle and have a good stretch. The only real disadvantage, I thought, would be the guy in the middle and the window-seat passenger disturbing you every time they needed to go to the loo. On this particular flight, while I enjoyed the “aisle legroom”, there was no chance of getting any sleep because all night the flight attendants rammed my knees with the trolleys and when that wasn’t happening, my neighbours were wanting to take loo trips. No joy.
People sometimes talk about these mythical upgrades to business class that you sometimes get as an economy class passenger. When you do, it’s like getting a golden ticket to the chocolate factory. It happened to me once on a small airline called Air Yemenia. The plane was half empty so a bunch of us were invited to move up to business class. Their business class area was nowhere near as premium as some of the other better-known airlines but the seat was huge; big enough to sleep in and that’s exactly what I did. I slept the entire flight and only woke up when the flight attendant nudged me to tell me that we were landing. I had no idea where the time went or even what they had served for dinner.
So in that sense I am the kind of passenger who would “waste” a business-class ticket. However, it was nice to see how the other half fly. But in the foreseeable future and until I land myself a tender or a ministerial position, it looks like it will be beer-gut armrests and sardine-can seats for me. - Sunday Tribune