Air Babylon

by Imogen Edwards-Jones

  ‘What would you like to drink, birthday boy?’ she asks, all glossy lips and smooth hair.

  ‘Champagne,’ says Andy. ‘And so will my mate.’

  Loraine pops a couple of mini bottles of some unknown brand and pours a little into each glass.

  ‘There you go.’ She smiles. ‘Enjoy,’ she adds, before turning her attention to the fat bloke on Andy’s right.

  ‘Happy birthday, mate,’ I say, clinking glasses with Andy.

  ‘Thanks. I’m very glad you came.’ He smiles. ‘All right there, ladies?’ he adds, leaning across me and raising his flute to Sue and Rachel.

  They both raise their glasses back.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ says Sue.

  ‘Thanks,’ he replies.

  ‘When are we doing presents?’ she asks. ‘Because I’ve got you something quite special.’ Her eyes look up towards the overhead locker.

  ‘You have?’ Andy’s cheeks flush under his tan.

  ‘Just a little something,’ she says.

  ‘We bought it together,’ says Rachel.

  There is a slight pause before Sue agrees. ‘Yes, we did.’ She is not a very good liar.

  ‘It’s best to wait for the crew room in Dubai,’ Andy says, taking a sip of champagne.

  No sooner does he take the glass away from his lips than he spills it all the way down the front of his shirt. We have hit some turbulence and the whole plane is shaking. We are bouncing up and down like a bone-shaker bicycle careering down a cobbled street. Sue spills her glass of champagne. I hold firmly on to mine. Suddenly the plane drops about twenty feet. All our buttocks part company with our seats. The ‘fasten seat belt’ sign springs back on. Gareth, Loraine, Edith and Craig struggle to get their trolleys back down the aisle. A small selection of Beefeater miniatures falls into my lap and a carton of Britvic Orange explodes onto the floor.

  ‘Fuck!’ says Edith as she rattles around in my trousers like a bargain hunter at a jumble sale. ‘I’m sorry. Are you all right?’

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Just nearly lost my manhood!’

  ‘Oh,’ she says, rapidly withdrawing her hand, like she’s only just realized where it’s been. ‘Sorry about that.’

  The plane lurches to the left and then swings to the right. The woman behind me starts to whine like a small dog. I turn around to see one set of white knuckles gripping the seat; her other hand is squeezing her husband’s thigh. She looks shit scared. The fat bloke next to Andy wakes up with a start and mutters something like ‘Jesus Christ!’ His voice is drowned out by the crash of bottles in the galley.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ comes the nasal, jaded voice of Gareth. ‘As you can see, the captain has turned on the “fasten seat belt” sign. Would you please return to your seat and fasten your seat belts. We seem to have hit a bit of turbulence.’

  ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ says Andy as the whole plane continues to rattle and shake like it’s going down the runway all over again.

  The whining woman behind me is beginning to cry; she yelps each time we hit a large bump and her husband keeps shushing her like it’s going to help. Craig and Edith strap themselves in just as the plane plummets another ten feet. There’s a scream from the back of the plane, the giant doll escapes from the overhead locker again, and at least six oxygen masks fall out of the ceiling. Someone in economy shouts ‘We’re going to die, we’re going to die!’ The flat vowels penetrate all the way to first class. Someone to my left starts to mutter the Lord’s Prayer.

  ‘This is ba-a-d,’ says Andy, growing pale beneath the orange. ‘This is really ba-a-a-d.’

  I have to admit that it doesn’t feel good. Turbulence is never fun, and this really is quite full on. The plane shakes left and then right. We bounce along for a second, like we’re falling down a hill, and then, suddenly, we stop. All is quiet. There’s a moment of silence and then comes a collective sigh of relief from the whole of club class.

  ‘Um, excuse me,’ comes a loud voice from about five rows back. ‘I think someone has been sick.’

  I poke my head around the edge of my seat to see that the whole of the back of the cabin has been sprayed in vomit. The sides of the plane, the ceiling and the carpet are all covered in a virulent orange glow.

  ‘Oh my God!’ screams another, rather posh-sounding voice. ‘They’ve been sick all over me!’

  ‘And me!’ adds someone else.

  It seems that the whole of the back row is covered. It’s extraordinary to think that one stomach could contain so much. It’s everywhere. There are chunks of pretzel on the ceiling and half-digested crisps all over the floor. The warm, sweet smell of sick is beginning to creep down the cabin.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ come the handsome tones of Richard. ‘This is your captain speaking. Sorry about it being a bit bouncy just then.’

  ‘A bit?’ says Andy, only just beginning to relax.

  ‘We encountered a bit of turbulence on our way down to the Alps. It shouldn’t be bothering us again. But just in case, I would suggest that when you are in your seats you keep your seat belt loosely fastened.’

  As Richard drones on about the rest of the flight, mentioning altitude, speed and various landmarks we shall be flying over, Edith and Craig appear in blue plastic catering gloves with coffee jugs full of soapy water.

  ‘It’s all glamour in the world of flying,’ says Craig as he walks towards the vomit.

  Two minutes later, Edith comes back and collects a dustpan and brush.

  ‘You OK?’ I ask as she comes past again.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ she says, shaking her pale face. ‘The last time I saw this much puke we had to close down the toilet. It was the last Sydney flight I did and this girl came up to me and told me that she’d been a little bit sick in the basin. When I went in the whole thing was full to the brim and overflowing down the sides. You couldn’t drain it so we had to bail the thing out, but we were handling food at the time, so we couldn’t.’ She shakes her head again. ‘We closed the whole thing down for the entire flight.’

  ‘God,’ I say, recoiling slightly. ‘That sounds disgusting.’

  ‘Yeah, it was.’

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ I nod at the dustpan.

  ‘Craig is sluicing down the back walls and I’m sweeping up the water and puke and putting it in the coffee jugs.’

  ‘Right . . .’

  ‘See you in a sec. We’ve got to get dinner out in a minute.’

  ‘See you,’ I say, making a mental note not to have tea or coffee later.

  Gareth comes out of the galley and stands next to me in the aisle, supervising the vomit clear-up. He has his hands on his hips and his head cocked to one side. His long nose wrinkles as he sighs.

  ‘It’s always the fat kids who vomit,’ he mutters out of the side of his mouth.

  ‘Sorry?’ I say.

  ‘Take it from me,’ he says, looking down. ‘The fat kids always puke. I had one last week who managed to projectile over six passengers.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Mmm,’ he says, looking up again. ‘Although this little fucker hasn’t done too badly.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘He’s taken out his mother and two other people.’ He walks up the cabin. ‘Evening, everyone,’ he says. ‘Sorry about all the mess but we should get this cleared up in no time. In the meantime, can I offer anyone a bag to put their soiled clothes in? And some extra blankets? Sadly we don’t have any clothes for you to change into. Unless of course you’d like a serving tunic?’

  Ten minutes later, after numerous trips up and down the aisle with hot soapy water and dustpans of puke, the vomit is cleared up, the passengers are hosed down and the smell of sick begins to abate. Gareth continues to supervise from the far end of club and a couple of the attendants from first poke their heads through the curtain to see what all the stench is about.

  ‘All right up at the front?’ asks Andy as he spots an attendant called Belinda at the curtain. A brassy blonde with a bit of a re
putation, Belinda has only recently been promoted to first class.

  ‘Not bad.’ She smiles. ‘The boy band is being a bit frisky.’

  ‘Really?’ Andy squirms slightly in his seat. ‘I think I might pop through and say hi.’

  ‘Can you wait till after service?’ asks Belinda. ‘We’re just about to hand out the warm rolls.’

  ‘Oh, OK,’ says Andy, slightly put out. It’s not often that he gets put in his place. ‘She’s a bit of a stroppy bitch, don’t you think?’ he comments once Belinda has disappeared.

  ‘Perhaps she just wants to keep the celebrities all to herself,’ I suggest.

  ‘You’re right.’ He nods. ‘You’re absolutely right.’

  Andy sits and contemplates Belinda’s celebrity-stealing capabilities while the crashing and clattering in the galley increases. The smell of hot food seeps down the plane, although what exactly this hot food is is anyone’s guess. That’s one of the main problems with airline food: it always looks and tastes the same, no matter how many swanky restaurants the food developers and celebrity chefs have been to. And that’s all to do with the preparation and the quality of the ingredients.

  All our meals are prepared on site, near the airport, by one of the large catering companies that is also used by most of the other airlines. These places are huge, cavernous warehouses where the rat-traps are regularly baited and the food is cook-chilled (i.e. cooked and then chilled to four degrees) or cook-frozen (cooked and then immediately frozen). The quality of the ingredients is not exactly top-drawer, but the main problem is the staff who cook it. None of them is a professionally trained chef. They are made up of locals recruited from the surrounding area whose criminal backgrounds can be checked as far back as five years, or they are loaders and baggage handlers with back problems who instead of being laid off sick end up stirring scrambled eggs for a living. There are some five hundred staff who work in the kitchens earning about £5 an hour, doing shifts that start at five a.m. and finish at midnight; between midnight and five a.m. the factory is hosed down ready for the place to start up again in the morning. The place used regularly to be raided by Immigration when half the staff would be taken away for questioning, but the introduction of biometrics – fingerprint and retina scanning – has reduced the number of illegals and cut down the job sharing that inevitably used to go on.

  However, according to my mate who works there, stealing is still rife. Anything that isn’t nailed down goes. He says they’d take your shoe laces if you stood still long enough. The buttons go off the machines and the toilet seats disappear, as do the taps in the bathrooms, and half the stuff never makes it to the factory in the first place. The amount of chicken breasts, fish, meat and alcohol that is creamed off at the back has to be seen to be believed, and some of the scams are so brazen. There was a £60K bus service that supposedly collected staff from around the local area that never actually ran. How they kept that one running for a year is anyone’s guess. But then these guys know how to keep everyone sweet. Come Christmas time, one of them is despatched to Baggage to fill up car boots with hampers and boxes of tricks for the festive season. The Baggage boys always pretend to refuse at first, before swiftly handing over their car keys. All you really need to do is check out the car park around the food area to see how much they are all making. There are just as many Jags and Mercs as you’d see over at Baggage.

  When you learn how much money the airlines shell out for your food, it’s a wonder anyone is making any cash at all. On a charter flight you can expect your meal to cost in the region of 90p. It goes up to £1.50 in a standard airline, rising to £2.50 in club and £5 in first, although there are some airlines who really do like to spoil you: Qantas spends up to £15 in first class, up to £10 in business and up to £5 in steerage. But it’s all about volume. On our flight today we have a full plane of three hundred passengers who can expect two meals each: dinner, and then the breakfast they’ll shove down their throats just before we land. We have three flights out of the airport today, and twenty flights out a week; most of them have up to three meals on board, so we have something like eighteen thousand meals a week leaving this airport alone. We don’t back-cater (i.e. we don’t stock up here for the return flight from Sydney) so we buy at least half that amount again in Australia. So if you are an airline it makes more sense to plump for the 30p dessert rather than the more extravagant 35p option.

  And none of this includes crew meals. The crew eat different food from the passengers, or at least they are supposed to. And the captain and the first officer have to have different meals just in case one of them falls ill. On the whole the crew eat better than the passengers, and our lot can be quite spoilt, with chunky Kitkats, salads or lasagne that they heat up themselves. A lot of the time they bring their own food to cook in the oven in the galley, or they half-inch the passengers’ food and pocket their crew rations to save themselves some cash. It’s usually the rookie attendants who steal passenger food, but it doesn’t take long for them to realize that passenger food makes you fat.

  Packed with preservatives, washed in chemicals and high in salt and fat, passenger food is perhaps the only packaged food we eat these days that does not have the number of calories or a list of ingredients printed down the side. It’s chosen for its reheating and reconstituting properties, and the recipes are put together so that the worst a hostie can do is burn, or drop, a meal. Fish and meat are usually covered in some sort of sauce to prevent drying out during the warming-up process. Food that flies well is food that can be roughly handled, left to sit for hours, and be reheated in less than eighteen minutes in ovens that reach 210 degrees. Passenger food is also designed to stop people caged in their seats for four to five hours from hitting the bottle and getting too drunk.

  Airline food is supposed to look palatable, have at least two colours on the plate, and not make you ill. The last thing an airline wants is for any of its passengers to get food poisoning. So although it may not taste of anything, you can be sure that the food hygiene standards during preparation were second to none. In the catering industry, hats and gloves are worn at all times. Discover glass in your food or some sort of hair or bug and you will be showered with champagne by the airline, but your name and address will also be filed. Food scammers are the bane of the airlines. Some people deliberately bring glass or bugs with them to put into their food. Only a couple of weeks ago we had some bloke complain about a beetle that later turned out to be a native of South Africa when the meal itself had been prepared in London. Needless to say he was not compensated, and his name has been circulated.

  Today, according to the menu in front of me, we’ve got salmon terrine as a starter, a choice of fish, chicken or lamb for main course, a chocolate parfait and fresh cream for dessert, and cheese and fruit and coffee and petits fours. None of it sounds too bad. If only I didn’t know where it all came from, and that it’s been reheated by the vomit-handed Craig and Edith, I might well be more keen to tuck in. Instead I stare at it all laid out in front of me, pick my way through the terrine, play with my lamb curry and take just a corner of the chocolate parfait, wondering if I might have another bottle of English white wine as compensation. I have to say that I am beginning to see the appeal of these new business lounges where you can have your meal before you fly. It’s much easier for all concerned and probably a whole lot more pleasant.

  ‘Don’t you want that?’ asks Andy, leaning over, his white plastic fork at the ready, eyeing my chocolate pudding.

  ‘No, mate,’ I reply. ‘You have it.’ I shove the white plastic dish over onto his table.

  ‘You’re not doing the no-carbs thing so your stomach doesn’t bloat, are you? Just greens and protein for you?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head. ‘I just don’t feel like it.’

  ‘Great,’ says Andy, piling in with his fork. ‘I’m bloody starving.’

  Craig rushes up all excited.

  ‘Guess what?’ he stage-whispers, squatting down by Andy’s chair.
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  ‘What?’ says Andy, his mouth full of chocolate.

  ‘Tom’s put Dulcolax in that mad nutter man’s food!’

  ‘Really?’ asks Andy.

  ‘He was going to wipe his steak around the toilet bowl, but it’s too difficult to do if you’re not in first or club. You know, everyone watches you and you can’t disappear off for a second with the meal, and the tea bag in the toilet was also too difficult as all the pots are communal, so he went for the laxative!’ Craig almost squeals with delight. ‘Loads of it!’

  ‘Great,’ says Andy, grinning widely and trying to look interested.

  ‘I’ll keep you informed,’ says Craig, standing up and tapping the side of his nose. ‘If there is any action, as it were.’

  He disappears into the galley in front of us, and judging by the loud laughter and giggling that ensue gets a much more satisfactory reaction to his news. He pokes his head around, catches Andy’s eye and makes a loud flatulent noise. The galley laughs again.

  ‘That’ll learn him,’ says Craig, giving us both a wink.

  10–11 PM

  WITH THIS QUALITY of entertainment on offer, I decide it might be more interesting to have a look at what the plane’s in-flight system has in store. As we’re not the most modern and up-to-date of airlines, we sadly still have the old tape system with the standard Hollywood-issue type of movies on offer. Some of the more luxurious airlines now offer fourteen-inch personal monitors, DVDs and AVOD (audio visual on demand), which means that you can choose your own film and pause if you fancy a chat, for a meal-break or a quick trip to the toilet; we, on the other hand, have a Hugh Grant film or Shrek 2 for our delight and delectation. Both are suitably old and both are suitably banal.

  But then, that is to be expected. Airlines are not allowed to show any Hollywood movies until three months after they have premiered in the US (although occasionally, because some films are so slow to progress across the pond, this can be before their UK release). The film packages on offer to the passenger vary from month to month, according to the time of year. During the school holidays, for example, we show more child-friendly material. The art-house stuff, although rare, does get shown during more low-season flights. Foreign films don’t translate too well as there isn’t much room for subtitles on small screens, but big hitters like Amélie do get a look-in. On the whole, the films chosen by those people who specialize in ordering in-flight entertainment for airlines are supposed to reflect the airline’s image. BA would like to think that their in-flight entertainment is ‘respectable, strong and intelligent’; Virgin, to go with their double-beds-in-upper-class image, might well have a slightly racier selection.