Air Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘So, how are you?’ I ask as he hands me a glass of champagne and a small packet of brandless pretzels. We don’t do nuts on our airline in case a passenger collapses with anaphylactic shock. Although the packet still does carry a ‘might contain nuts’ warning.

  ‘Oh God, you know,’ he says, with a small sniff. ‘I think I might be getting a cold. You would have thought I’d be over all that by now, after nearly twenty years in the business. But apparently not.’

  Rookie flight attendants are always struck down by every available illness when they start the job. Their close proximity to the general public and the constant circling of foul air means that they spend their first eight months or so with streaming colds and constant flu. Then, just when they think they can’t take any more, they cross some sort of immune-system Rubicon, and they are never ill again. They develop the constitution of an ox. They wave snot and sneezes away for ever and can stay up all night, fly all day and still make happy hour when they land. I’ve always thought it’s because they slowly replace their blood with alcohol, but apparently it’s down to overexposure to germs and bottles of echinacea.

  ‘Can’t you take something for it?’ I ask.

  ‘No doubt Tom has some little pill I can have,’ he says, rolling his eyes. ‘Champagne?’ he asks the man behind me.

  I take a sip of my champagne. It is quite tart and acrid, and the bubbles go straight up my nose. It’s not top-drawer stuff, but then again, we’re not a top-drawer airline. However, I still can’t believe that from all the champagnes our head of wine, Roger, had to choose from, he opted for this paint stripper. But then Roger has always had appalling taste.

  I remember when he joined the airline about six years ago he changed all the wines and champagnes we were carrying overnight. There were rumours that he’d been given some sort of backhander. We’d always carried a rather nice Moët in first and a fizzy brut in club, and now we have some champagne that no-one has heard of and English white wine. He justified it by telling us it was the talk of the Cannes Duty Free Festival. But I can’t say that I believe him. I’ve been to the Cannes Duty Free Festival myself and everyone gets so plastered there it’s a wonder they can talk at all, let alone have a coherent conversation about champagne.

  As freebie festivals go, Cannes Duty Free has to be one of the best. Anyone who is anyone in the food and drink business sets up shop on the Riviera for a couple of days in the summer in order to woo the airlines and any of the other carriers. They are so desperate to get their products on board planes, ferries and cruise ships that gin companies rent boats, vodka manufacturers hire speedboats, and they lay on an endless stream of tastings and parties. And when I tell you that a small company like Air Fayre churns out eighteen thousand meals a day for a small carrier like BMI, then you’ll understand the sort of ten-million-plus volume the big boys like Gate Gourmet are producing for the likes of Virgin and British Airways. Get yourself in the first-class cabin of one of the big airlines and your profits go through the roof. I have heard of other airlines accepting envelopes stuffed with £2,000 in cash from alcohol suppliers desperate to get on the duty-free trolleys they wheel up and down the planes. It doesn’t do to scrutinize Roger’s alcohol choices too much, or indeed ask yourself too often how he can afford that air-conditioned conservatory.

  Then again, our head of food, or development chef, Dennis, is just as bad. He gets flown all over the world to eat in the best restaurants, and all in the name of research. It’s the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. As if his eating at the Rock Pool restaurant in Sydney is going to make any difference to the sort of stuff they serve us on a flight. I know for a fact that he regularly dines at all of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants; he’s also been to Jamie Oliver’s Fifteen, the Ivy, Sheekey’s, Zuma, all the gourmet hotspots, and he’s had a stint at Mosimann’s Academy, all in the name of following food fashion. He also flies on rival airlines just to sample the food and check out the competition, to see if we are up to date with the chicken chasseur we are serving. The extraordinary thing is that most of the food carried by other airlines comes out of the same place. So if you really want to see what the other teams are doing, all you need to do is get yourself down to the south perimeter fence and knock on the door. Yet somehow Dennis managed to justify a flight on Concorde in the name of research.

  I knock back my champagne and put a dry pretzel in my mouth. It’s far too salty. As I lean back in my seat I can hear some shouting. There seems to be something of an argument brewing in economy. Andy and I look at each other.

  ‘What d’you think is going on?’ he asks, his mouth full of pretzels.

  ‘No idea,’ I say, straining to look down the aisle.

  Craig swishes out of first class and brushes past. ‘Fight!’ he says with a grin, rubbing his hands together.

  ‘Over what?’ I ask.

  ‘Leg room,’ he replies, turning round. ‘Come and take a look.’

  Both Andy and I look at each other again and immediately get out of our seats, making our way to the curtains that divide club from cattle class. In the galley to our left there are a couple of hosties taking their shoes off, exchanging heels for flats and putting their names on bottles of water.

  ‘I don’t know what his problem is,’ says one to the other. ‘Each of those seats is much like the other and they all give you DVT.’

  ‘Maybe he’s just one of those stressed-out bastards,’ the other replies.

  Andy and I poke our heads through and it appears that she is right. For standing about three rows back, in the middle of the middle section, and shouting his surly head off is the annoying stressed bastard Debbie and I conspired to put next to the fattest man on the plane.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I say.

  ‘What?’ asks Andy.

  ‘That’s the wanker Debbie and I deliberately placed next to the fat bastard because he was being so annoying.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, oh. I think perhaps I might keep a low profile. I’m going back to my seat. You coming?’

  ‘You kidding? And miss this?’

  The surly bloke is making so much noise that the whole of the back end of the plane is staring at him. One of the young economy-class flight attendants is trying to calm him down and he is shouting so close to her face that she has her eyes shut. Gareth moves in to see if he can do any better. Meanwhile, Craig has been despatched to phone the flight deck. He is muttering something down the telephone near the galley. As I walk back to my seat, I meet the first officer, with three stripes on his shoulder, marching towards me. This is serious stuff. For the first officer to leave the flight deck and abandon his cup of tea and pre-flight snacks, it takes some ruckus. Two minutes later he marches back, followed by Andy a few moments later.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask as he sits back down and fastens his seat belt.

  ‘The first officer came down and threatened to kick him off the plane if he didn’t sit down. He also pulled out some plastic handcuffs and said that he would use them without a moment’s hesitation. Or he would have the man arrested. He looked bloody furious.’

  ‘I bet. It takes a lot to get them out of their section.’

  ‘He sure as hell meant business. I love it when a man gets all masterful,’ he adds, draining his champagne glass.

  Edith comes through to collect the glasses and the empty bags of pretzels. Meanwhile, Craig and a very young-looking attendant take their places at the front of each of the aisles for the safety demonstration.

  ‘First day on the job,’ whispers Craig, with a nod of his head in the girl’s direction. ‘Few little tricks up our sleeve.’

  Craig and the young woman start the safety demonstration as the plane taxis off its stand. It always amazes me how few people pay attention to this bit. I know most people think that if the plane crashes their chances of survival are minimal, and to a certain extent that is true. It’s often said that the reason you are told to adopt the brace position – head between your knees, arms either
side of your head – in the event of a crash is so that you break your neck nice and cleanly and protect your dental records. That way you are unable to sue the airline and much easier to identify. The same goes for a water landing. The idea that a small yellow life jacket with a whistle will make any difference as the plane sinks into the sea, the cynics say, is risible. Yet in some cases, like when the skyjacked Ethiopian Airlines B-767 ditched in the sea off the Comoros Islands in 1996, it did. Despite instructions to the contrary from members of the cabin crew, several passengers had pre-inflated their life jackets and were unable to escape the rising water inside the fuselage, but others survived. It is also worth remembering that there have been several cases of planes overshooting runways at coastal airports and dropping into the sea. There have even been two cases since the late eighties of planes running out of runway at La Guardia airport and ending up in the bay. So perhaps a cursory glance at the flight attendant over your magazine is probably a good idea.

  Although, looking up at the young woman in front of me, I kind of wish I hadn’t bothered. As she places the oxygen mask over her mouth and nose and tugs on the imaginary line, I can see from the expression on her face that something is wrong. As she removes the mask, I and the rest of the cabin can see that her mouth and chin are covered in orange marmalade. The poor girl’s cheeks turn bright red and she clenches her fists in embarrassment. Craig grins widely at the in-crew joke. The rookie attendant carries on. She places her yellow life jacket over her head, straps it around her waist and reaches into her top pocket for the whistle. While she blows valiantly away on the small white tampon that has hilariously replaced her whistle, Craig bites his cheeks to stop himself from laughing. This is an economy-class initiation that has been moved into club class for Andy’s and my benefit. Only the sad thing is that Andy is reading GQ magazine and I’m a little bit too old to find it amusing.

  As the girl skulks past back to economy, pointing out the emergency exits as she goes, Craig leans forward. ‘We’ll be sending her through to take a “long stand” with the captain later,’ he shares, doing his quotation-mark thing again. ‘I remember when I went through for my long stand, it took me twenty minutes of standing to realize that the joke was on me.’ He giggles. ‘I wonder how long she will last?’

  ‘Let’s see,’ says Andy, not quite exuding the same level of enthusiasm as his flatmate.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Craig as he goes to take his chair for take-off. ‘See you in a sec,’ he adds, leaning across the large stomach of the snoring man next to Andy to flip up his window blind.

  The lights dim for take-off. Traditionally, we turn the lights off and open the blinds for take-off and landing so as to orientate the passengers inside the plane. In the event of a crash, it helps if your eyes are adjusted to the light outside, and the emergency path-lighting is more visible as you sprint up the aisle. There is, however, another much more sinister theory to which Craig subscribes: the plane blinds are raised so that in a crash situation – statistically much more likely to happen during take-off or landing – it is easier for the emergency services to count corpses through the windows, instead of having to board the plane.

  We trundle up to the end of the runway and sit there. We’ve missed our slot due to our slight fog delay. There’s a queue of some three or four planes ahead of us. This is a busy time of the night for the airport as they try to get all the planes into the air before the midnight deadline. I suspect they are all stacked up in a line behind us down the side of the runway.

  The engines rev up. We turn the corner at the top of the runway and the captain increases the speed. We rattle along the tarmac, drips of water from the dodgy air-con falling on my head. An overhead locker bursts open and a giant doll falls into the aisle. Craig gets out of his seat and shoves it back in, slamming the door firmly shut.

  ‘Christ, did you see that?’ asks Andy as we are pushed back into our seats. ‘That reminds me of that flight Craig went on when all those Japanese passengers got into pyjamas and climbed into the overheads.’ He grins. ‘Thought they were beds, do you remember?’

  ‘Yeah.’ I nod, my cheeks vibrating with the speed. ‘That must have been such a strange flight.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he nods back. ‘Imagine something like that happening here.’

  9–10 PM

  WE LIFT OFF. I feel a surge in my stomach. I love it when a flight takes off. They say there’s something about jet fuel that gets into your blood, and I think they’re right. Almost as soon as I strap myself into a plane or feel it rattle down a runway, I get the sweet buzz of adventure. I sit back in my chair and smile.

  We bank right and fly over the southern perimeter fields that are, by day, populated by camera-wielding plane-spotters (forced there since they closed the viewing gallery after 9/11), and by night by Special Branch officers on the lookout for sharp-shooting terrorists with handheld rocket launchers. Andy and I look through the fat man’s window and the sickly smell of roast chicken fills the air. A couple of birds are cooking in the engines. That’s another two Don hasn’t managed to save, I think, as I sit in silence staring at the ever-diminishing lights below.

  The plane turns to the left a bit and starts to flatten out. The captain rings a bell and both Edith and Craig get out of their seats. Our seat-belt signs are still lit as they disappear into the galley just in front of us to change into their serving jackets, and in Edith’s case to change shoes. I can hear them rattling around in there, mumbling snatches of conversation. Another bell goes off. Edith pokes her head out of the galley. It’s a blue light, which can only mean one of three things: a gin and tonic, a blanket or an extra pillow. A pink light in the galley is an alert or emergency call, and an amber is the toilet, which means that someone is either stuck in there, a child has switched it on, or a couple are having sex in there and have hit the button with their backsides. Edith walks past, attaching the Velcro sides of her navy tunic. She pauses to take something out of an overhead locker. She’s betting, like I would, on some princess down the back wanting a blanket.

  Talk to any number of flight attendants and they’ll tell you that passengers divide up into easily definable groups. The worst, they say, are the princesses who always want a blanket or a little pillow immediately after take-off. They’re always too cold or too hot, and invariably ask for the cabin temperature to be altered. They are fussy when it comes to food and ask if they can have everything fresh, and on the side. They drink obscure alcoholic drinks and continually demand bottles of water. They are loaded down with sprays, perfumes and unctions which they squirt around the cabin. They wear pashminas for comfort and DVT socks for their health and are full of questions. Why haven’t we taken off yet? Why are we late? How long is the flight? Why aren’t we there yet? And they are usually the first in line when it comes to the flight attendants spitting in their drinks or adding a bit of Dulcolax laxative to their meal.

  Then again, the uptight control-freak man is just as bad. He always needs somewhere to hang his coat and somewhere extra special for his rather large briefcase he won’t put into the hold and won’t fit into the overhead locker. He resents turning off his computer and mobile phone and insists on using them right up until the last possible minute. He also resents taking orders from women or poofs, so basically he thinks that the normal plane rules don’t apply to him. He is always first out of his seat before the seat-belt sign goes off, and first to the exit once the plane has taxied to its stand. He complains about the food and the choice of alcohol, and more often than not demands an extra bit of something, such as cheese, after all the food has been cleared away. He is not a popular passenger and a prime candidate for a face-fart halfway through the flight.

  Other passengers are simpler to deal with: the trip-of-a-lifetime couple who want to fill you in on all the details of their itinerary; the loved-up holidaymakers who might try to make a sex-trip to the toilet during the flight; the horny businessman who tries to buy a hostie some duty-free perfume; and the harassed young co
uple with small child, who just need blankets and sympathy. There are, however, some uppity women who hand over their babies to the flight attendants for ‘changing’. A mate of mine once took a white child down the end of the plane only to return with a black one, asking the woman if the baby was ‘changed enough for her’. The pushy mother finally got the hint. But most of the time harassed parents just need a bit more wine than anyone else.

  But it’s the upgraders who really tuck in. Perhaps it’s the fact that they haven’t paid for their flight that makes them so greedy, or maybe they haven’t seen such luxury before in their lives. Craig tells a story of a woman upgraded to first who ordered everything on the menu. She had the soup, the entrée, the focaccia, two main courses, dessert and cheese. Craig says that she sat there stuffing her face halfway to Sydney. By the end of the flight it was a wonder she was able to move at all. Upgraders also have a habit of getting quite drunk. There is a sensible drinking policy on all airlines, which means that we are not supposed to serve passengers once they start getting a little loud and leery, but there is also a school of thought that if you fill them with enough drink they will eventually fall asleep and give you no trouble at all. And as every flight attendant knows, a snoring plane is a happy plane – which is, of course, why we like to turn the heating up halfway through a flight.

  The captain switches the seat-belt sign off. The man in the row behind me leaps out of his seat and grabs something terribly urgent from the locker above. Craig and Edith drag a trolley of drinks down my aisle, while Gareth and another friend of Andy’s called Loraine do the other side.

  In her early twenties, Loraine is one of those ambitious new recruits who will go a long way in the business. Her appearance is immaculate, her make-up is piled on, her nails and lips match, her dark hair is twisted into a bun, and she’s wearing some old-school pearls. She is not the normal sort of friend for Andy to collect. Then again, I don’t think he had much choice in the matter. Loraine soon worked out that Andy was a popular member of the airline and made sure that he became a friend.