The Sun-Herald

Flying : the height of misery

At 40,000 feet the other day, I finally fathomed why I'm driven to watch so much Aircrash Investigation. It's a reminder that air travel could be worse than the ordeal it already is.

Flying, no matter how good the airline, comes with its unique, universal indignities: everyone emerges from a long haul flight looking and feeling as if they've spent 10 hours in a vulture's colon; even the quietest child feels compelled to scream non-stop from take-off to landing, and then there's the soul-sapping ordeal of security screening, during which you are now required to remove so many clothes the spectacle seems incomplete without accompanying music, choreography and a neon sign.

Some airlines try to compensate for these hardships by hiring pleasant staff and treating the passengers kindly. Others seem to operate under the philosophy that if something's already crap, then you must strive to make it completely, outstandingly crap.

I don't know why, but things seem to go particularly pear-shaped when Qantas and BA get together for a mid-air party. Their code-sharing services seem to exist solely to prove that two wrongs don't make a right. I've suffered at their hands so much of late, that I feel like writing to Richard Branson just to thank him for existing. Both carriers used to give great service, but now you're likely to find better on the red-eye out of Kinshasa. As a Pom living in Australia, I feel twofold national shame.

Last year, despite layers of sophisticated security procedures, Qantas/BA put me on the wrong flight at Heathrow. The ground staff actually directed me away from the right one, and onto another one going to the same place, but a different way. Only when I was aboard it, with my bedsocks already on, and a man came along and claimed my seat did it emerge that despite my boarding pass being checked twice by humans and once by a machine, it was for another flight entirely. The one sitting two gates along.

How could it happen? "I've no idea," said the befuddled BA man who was summoned to move me discreetly to the right aircraft. "It just doesn't."

I must be uncommonly unfortunate, because when I took out the boarding pass for the second leg of my Qantas/BA Sydney-Frankfurt flight last week, it bore a long, complicated German name that wasn't mine (although it perhaps could have been an anagram of it). I showed it to the ground staff at Singapore and they examined it with similar bewilderment. After lots of supervisors came to stare at me and my passport, a new seat was found, I was declared safe and allowed to be myself again.

No harm done, but it does make you wonder why we must shuffle like abattoir-bound cattle through the endless ignominies of increasingly invasive security screening when you could turn out to be flying under Osama Bin Laden's name quite by accident.

As it turned out, I was one of the lucky passengers. The woman in the seat next to me boarded in tears. "I got held up in the security queue," she said. 'Then when I got through, an airline woman shouted at me for being late. No-one's ever spoken to me like that."

I tried to console her by saying everything would be all right now she was on board, but I was fibbing and we both knew it.

The cabin crew, who wore the expressions of inmates in the early stages of a long sentence, were bovine at best, belligerent at worst. They urged us to walk around in-flight to avoid DVTs but when I got up (seatbelt lights were off) to visit the bathroom, a male hostie with a ravaged face that had probably seen too many dawns from inside Arq snapped: 'where are you going?"

The sink was blocked and the toilet was fragranced with Ogre's Armpit. I held my breath the whole time I was in there. I would have closed my eyes, too, but didn't want to fall off. The floor hosted too many nameless fluids.

Then it was time for Chicken or Lamb. 'Lamb, please," I said. No, said the hostie, (female this time, a bit wide for the aisles, wearing a resentful glare). "We only had enough for those people." She jabbed an elbow at the 10 passengers between me and the front.

A moot point, I suppose, as it would have been lamb by name only, but the illusion of choice might have been comforting.

The man on our left gazed disconsolately at the wretched little landscape of his food tray, which had just been delivered like an insult. He was tall, and his knees were close to his ears. "Flying," he said with a heavy sigh, "has become an exercise in humility."

I know, I know. When you fly economy you're not booking into Chateau Marmont. But is decent, basic service - even the level you'd find in a greasy spoon - too much to ask? And as my mum always said, smiles cost nothing.

As it turned out, there was worse to come. For the last leg of my return flight from the US to Sydney I was booked on Jetstar, Qantas' cheap little sister.

You don't expect much from a budget airline of course, so I'd brought my own food, entertainment and painkillers. But for a while it didn't look as if I'd get to use them, because the computer belched at the check-in desk and refused to let the lady find me a seat. While she pleaded with it and went off to find help, the queue filed past and I waited. For 20 minutes.

Eventually, tired and dispirited, I made it just in time and sank into my window seat. Just as I did, a male hostie who'd clearly been made in the same factory as the check-in computer materialised and appraised me as if I was grime. He looked very angry, perhaps because his uniform was orange. But his wrath was directed at me.

'Can I see your boarding pass?" he said. "You shouldn't be here.' Seat and boarding pass matched. 56A. The seat was normal. There were other ones just like it all around, with passengers in them. 'This is where I'm supposed to rest," he said. "I'm going to have to move you. This is a 10 hour flight, you know."

And I kid you not, he pouted.

The flight was packed. The only spare seat I could see was between two wriggling toddlers. I was tired. I just wanted to be left alone. Like most people, I work 10-hour days too - and without the luxury of a snooze on a seat in my tea break.

I'd had enough of Jetstar already and we hadn't even taken off. "No thanks, actually," I said. "I'll just stay here."

For a moment I thought he was going to swear at me. And then whatever training he'd had kicked in just enough for him to stop himself, ram my bag into the overhead locker and flounce off down the aisle.

Credit where it's due; the meanie's colleague apologised afterwards and told me there was no need to move. He offered me another, nicer seat and tried very hard to make up for his budget airline's budget manners. But I won't be flying with them again unless I'm forced to by someone holding my loved ones hostage.

It takes a lot to deter me from flying. I need to do it for work. And I've also always quite enjoyed air travel's unique vicissitudes; it's amusing devising yoga positions to sleep in, playing guess the meat and marvelling at the flight attendants' ways with a hair scrunchie. These are all part of the aircraft cabin's idiosyncratic world and you can make it go away with a sleeping pill.

But now I wish there was a kinder way to get where you need to be. I went on a cruise recently and learned that it is possible to arrive at your destination rested and happy, rather than traumatised and persecuted. It just takes weeks instead of hours.

Perhaps in this day and age we must accept that the romance of air travel is all but gone and the best you can hope for is to arrive at your destination in one piece.