Best Literary Description of the Hell that is Air Travel!

How do you enjoy air travel? Not a lot.. if you are anything like me! I want to get where I’m going but I really don’t like the way I have to get there. The over-crowding, the searches, the endless waiting, the poor food, the strange habits of fellow passengers…etc etc.

Flying Tin Tubes

Now there is so much wrong with air travel and I feel too linguistically inadequate to express the full horror of modern day air travel. So.. to-day… I am launching a search for the Best Literary Description of the Hell that is Air Travel!

Please feel free to add your suggestions.. or indeed pen your own descriptions.  🙂

And the first nomination is…. Thomas Harris for this great piece from HANNIBAL:-

“Back in steerage where the package tours go, the fifty-two members of the Old World Fantasy, a tour of eleven countries in seventeen days, are returning to Detroit and Windsor, Canada.Shoulder room is twenty inches. Hip room between armrests in twenty inches. This is two inches more space than a slave had on the Middle Passage.

The passangers are being slopped with freezing-cold sandwiches of slippery meat and processed cheese food, and are rebreathing the farts and exhalations of others in economically reprocessed air, a variation on the ditch-liquor principle established by cattle and pig merchants in the 1950s.

Dr Hannibal Lecter is in the center of the middle row in steerage with children on both sides of him and a woman holding an infant at the end of the row. After so many years in cells and restraints Dr Lecter does not like to be confined. A computer game in the lap of a small boy beside him beeps incessantly.”
HANNIBAL by Thomas Harris: Arrow Books, Chapter 48

So.. what’s your favourite description of the hell that is modern flying? Please feel free to post your nominations… or.. just pen a wee paragraph yourself?

I look forward to everyone’s entries… your flights of fancy!! 🙂

A380 Delivered!

It’s happened.. the first A380 has been delivered to Singapore Airlines. It’s a massive thing as you already know and has attracted lots of media attention on the recent tour testing out landing facilities around the world.

And it is an absolutely fascinating machine. Tickets for the first commercial flight are supposedly changing hands for $100,000! All the proceeds are going to charity which is a nice touch. Pretty steep! But hey… if you have the money then why not?

The size of this thing is… well… amazing! But the luxury is quite staggering as well. That is the luxury for 1st class and business passengers. As usual there is a cattle class for the rest of us!

Business Week suggests economy passengers should try to book for the top deck where the seats are only 8 abreast instead of 10 abreast as they are on the lower deck. Here… have a look at