Wingless birds

Picture: Emirates

If there is one thing that I have mixed feelings for as a result of the pandemic, it’s that it has severely curtailed travel. There are reminders everywhere: friends posting pictures from parts of the world not in lockdown and Facebook's own ever-helpful reminder facility of fun times gone by. The other day we got a glimpse on television of Palma in Mallorca, the last time either of us were on foreign soil or travelled anywhere by plane. And that was October 2019.

I can’t complain, though. By the time I left my previous job, a month before that trip, I’d taken 52 flights in as many weeks, a ridiculous and unsustainable amount of air travel. As my various frequent flier memberships attest, I’ve experienced my fair share of work and leisure travel over the last three decades, not least of which the 17 years I lived abroad. During that time, too, I got to fly on most types of airliner, nerdishly satisfying my childhood planespotting hobby from the inside out. Even during that last 12 months of intense air travel for work, I never failed to get a little excited boarding a Boeing 747, or one of the brand-spanking new Airbus A350s, and was in a constant dilemma over whether it truly is better to travel than to arrive.

Picture: British Airways

My first flight on the Airbus A380 ‘superjumbo’ came on my birthday in 2011. My friend was playing a gig in New York, and being 11/11/11, I thought I’d treat myself to a birthday weekend away. Turning up at the gate at Paris Charles de Gaulle, I was confronted by the bulbous prow of the 380 - a plane I’d previously only seen from the ground at the Farnborough Airshow. With the 747 the first jumbo I’d ever flown on, on my first ever trip to the US, it was genuinely exciting to be boarding only the second type of passenger plane of that size to enter mainstream airline service. To satisfy my own geekdom, the giant double-decker had innovations such as cameras in the tail and underside that allowed you to see where you were going on the seatback screens, a feature I found addictive as we taxied to the departure runway and, before you knew it, this lumbering giant lifted off, gracefully and physics-defyingly, with hardly any sense of acceleration. I hardly watched anything else on that screen for the duration of the flight, even if the vista was mostly cloud.

I would go on to travel several more times on the A380, with Air France again, British Airways and Emirates, to places like Miami, Los Angeles and Dubai, each flight as comfortable and uncomplicated as any I’d ever had. Which is why I’m genuinely sad to see that the type is already for the knacker’s yard. 

Just as COVID-19 has brought about the end of the delightful 747, most recently for BA and Virgin Atlantic, who retired theirs this year, the pandemic has hit the airlines’ fleets of other big jets, with the A380 faring worst. 

More than 90% of the four-engined planes have been grounded since the coronavirus curtailed international air travel, and it now seems like many will never take off again. Research by aviation data specialists Cirium suggests that 380s - along with older A340s and some Boeing 777s - are being retired “sooner than expected”. 

Even though the 380 was only introduced in 2005, and most airliners remain in mainstream service for up to 30 years, it has always proven to be a challenging aircraft to fill. In some configurations it can seat up to 800 passengers, although no airline has actually taken up that option. The biggest problem for the A380 - even before the pandemic struck - is that gas-guzzling four-engined aircraft have become unfashionable, especially with long-distance travel now covered, perfectly safely, by super-fuel-efficient twinjets like the Boeing 787 DreamLiner and A350. 

Picture: Emirates

Still, though, airlines invested in them, most notably Emirates who married the plane to their strategy of making Dubai its global operations hub. The airline even put great store behind attracting premium customers, with enhanced first and business class cabins that included better in-flight WiFi than that on the economy deck, and even suites with their own showers.

As of today, the airline has 112 of the type in service, almost half the total built, but has effectively brought the aircraft’s production to an end by announcing that it would not be taking up the final 11 of its 123-plane order. The last 380 will roll off the Airbus production line next year. According to Cirium’s 2020 Airline Insights Review, as of this month, only 21 A380s were in service, with some 219 in storage, some indefinitely while others might end up being covered into freighters. Air France - with whom I made my 380 debut - has already withdrawn its fleet permanently, with Lufthansa and others planning for a near future without them. 

There are two key factors at work here: firstly, the 380 has been a victim of its own short history. By the time Airbus got it off the ground, industrial advances in more fuel-efficient airframe and engine technologies were already producing new marques that were instantly appealing to cost-conscious airline CFOs. The 380, like the 747, quickly became an icon, and much loved by those who flew on it (and who flew it). But it was something of an anachronism, even by the time it first took off. Sadly, its withdrawal so soon after COVID brought about the demise of the 747, has become inevitable. 

The second factor is, clearly, a pandemic that has decimated air travel. Some predictions suggest that it won’t be until the middle of this decade before the industry returns to anything like it was before the virus broke out. As we saw in the wake of SARS and 9/11, air travel will return, once the majority of passengers feel it safe to do so (though that hasn’t stopped others…), but it raises the question as to how it will return. 

All I know is that we can’t stay cooped up forever, and this time of year - with TV ads for holidays and the Sunday supplements doing their best to tempt you to places you could go, the desire to get on a plane and go somewhere will only grow stronger. It’s just unlikely that you’ll be doing it on one of the most distinctive and comfortable airliners I’ve ever flown on. #sadface

Picture: British Airways

Falling out of love with the world's favourite airline

YouTube/British Airways

Last Friday, at the end of a week in which British Airways cancelled, without warning or explanation, my flight back to London from Silicon Valley, the airline breezily launched "a love letter to Britain", a glossy TV commercial featuring, amongst other famous British faces, Gary Oldman, Olivia Colman, Anthony Joshua, Ellie Simmonds, Nicola Adams, Paloma Faith and a posthumous cameo from David Bowie, all presenting a cosy, patriotic picture of an airline that is, now, owned by an Anglo-Spanish company based in Madrid.

It’s all part of BA's centenary which, according to an e-mail that landed the same day, marked “a hugely exciting time for us". The e-mail went on to trill that BA "wouldn't be celebrating without you. You have made us who we are today, and we're immensely proud of how far we've flown together”, followed by the revelation that "since you first travelled with us in 2003 you have flown 201,191 miles, which is the same as flying 8.1 times around the world." This, however, is not strictly true: I’ve been flying with BA a lot longer than that, it’s just that I only signed up to its Executive Club loyalty scheme in 2003. Here in lies part of what makes the modern-day British Airways - a lot of marketing masking an absence of the substance that built the so-called British “flag carrier” and its reputation in the first place. It’s been a long time since BA could call itself "the world's favourite airline". Because, frankly, there are many others that are simply better.

I say this partly out of love and loyalty. I took my first BA flight in 1989, and it was quite a way to start - First Class to and from Moscow as part of a Sky TV documentary team. I began flying regularly with BA in the mid-90s when my PR job with Philips frequently took me to Amsterdam, Berlin and elsewhere in Europe. And then, when I moved to Amsterdam itself in 1999, BA became, for the following 17 years living abroad, something of a bus service. So you could say that over the last 30 years I’ve invested considerable loyalty in the brand, even if it doesn’t show anywhere near enough reciprocal love these days as once it might.

BA has become a 'cost down' carrier, managed by accounting fanatics desperate to shave every last percentage point of profit from its revenues, regardless of the reputational damage it does. As a relatively minor case in point, BA's short-haul flights have stopped offering free snacks in economy class and have moved to the easyJet/Ryanair model of selling sandwiches and drinks at vastly inflated prices. Even if they are from Marks & Spencer (a gimmick in Britishness, even if M&S probably source their sarnies from the same supplier as easyJet), a Honey Roast & Farmhouse Cheddar Cheese Sandwich costs £3.90 in the air, whereas you'd pay £2.50 on the ground. Add £2.45 for a cup of tea and you’ve spent more than six quid on something other airlines give away for free. I’m sure most people could do without a snack for an hour or so, but what price a hot drink? Oh, and things get more interesting if you choose to conveniently use your Avios loyalty points instead of the cash you can’t easily get to in your cramped seat: on a two-hour evening flight back from Madrid the other week I bought that sandwich/tea combo, and dispensed with 900 Avios points for the privilege. To put this into perspective, I earned just 1000 Avios flying to and from Zurich with BA a few days later.

While we're on the topic of BA's stingy rewards, there is the Executive Club scheme itself. Progress through the different membership tiers is what drives the repeat business. As you go higher, you gain benefits like lounge access, free seat selection (avoiding the exorbitant charges to reserve a seat you were going to get, anyway) and priority rebooking in the event of flights being cancelled or overbooked. Here, BA has grown ever more light-fingered. That flight from Madrid was the third leg a trip from London to Milan, Milan to Madrid and then back to London. For my trouble I earned just five tier points from the flights from and to London, and ten from the middle flight, despite all three being of identical length and me sitting in economy throughout. The only difference was that the Milan-Madrid journey was with Iberia, BA's sister airline within the IAG group, and should therefore offer no difference to the BA rewards scheme. Another gripe is that occasionally I will take up the offer of a cabin upgrade for cash. Firstly, this doesn’t render any 'cabin bonus' tier points, which seems a little cheap. But there's worse: shortly before my trip to San Jose the other day I saw on the BA iPhone app that the magic 'Upgrade' button was highlighted, informing me that upgrades were possible. I discovered that I could upgrade both outbound and return flights to World Traveller Plus (premium economy) for the princely sum of just under £2,000 - £2,000! I could have booked two complete tickets in that class for that price when I’d made the original booking. So I declined, until the nice man at the check-in desk said that I could move up a cabin for just £270. Bit of a difference, that...

If BA's contemptuous attitude to economy passengers, manifested by a loyalty scheme that barely justifies the word loyalty, isn’t enough, then its planes - the very basis of its existence - are creaking. Not literally, thankfully, but the overwhelming feeling flying BA these days is that it’s not able to keep up with the modern fleets of many of its rivals, especially the Asian and Middle Eastern carriers. Remember my arbitrarily cancelled flight from San Jose? Well, it would have been made on a relatively new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, one of the new class of fuel-efficient, carbon fibre-constructed jets that feature all sorts of innovations to improve passenger comfort and wellbeing.

Picture: Nick Morrish/British Airways

My first experience of a BA Dreamliner wasn’t good - a flight to New Jersey in one of the most cramped economy class cabins I’ve ever experienced. Fair to say, my outbound journey to San Jose the other Sunday was more comfortable and in the larger and newer 787-9 Dreamliner model. Unfortunately, my journey back, rescheduled as a flight from San Francisco, an hour's drive away from San Jose on a Friday afternoon, was on an ageing Boeing 777, on which the crew couldn't switch off the cabin lights, less than ideal on a ten-hour overnight journey (ironically, the lights finally went off when the plane landed, as if all the system needed was a damn good whack). Its one nod to modernity was on-board WiFi, something in which BA has lagged behind many other major carriers for years (I first used it on an American Airlines flight ten years ago...). BA has promised to introduce wireless connectivity on 118 of its long-haul aircraft by this year, but based on my experience (i.e. just two of the ten long-haul flights I’ve made with the airline over the last 12 months), that rollout is taking a while. Getting WiFi into its planes should even be an opportunity for BA, given the premium it can charge for high-bandwidth streaming. The BYOD model could even replace traditional inflight entertainment, as passengers use their iPads and phones, often with better screens than seatback systems, to stream content from Netflix or catch-up players, or watch pre-downloaded programming.

A large part of BA's long-haul fleet is shockingly old, and staying that way. On another trip to Silicon Valley before Christmas I flew on a 20-year-old Boeing 747. Now, there's no doubting the romance of the “Queen of the skies", as aviation buffs call it. There is still a sense of grandeur to clambering aboard the original Jumbo Jet, with that massive, haughty-looking prow, its cockpit windows looking like the eyes of a slightly snooty headmistress, and its massive interior which, before ruthless airline economics took hold, used to feel luxuriously spacious. When it first flew in 1969, the 747 was a technological marvel: a giant ocean liner of the air that could seat well over 400 passengers comfortably in an age when 'jet set' not only evoked who was on board but also a degree of comfort to which even the most lowly economy passenger could enjoy. On top of that it was quick, too, averaging around 500 miles per hour in cruise. Today, though, it’s an anachronism - a four-engined gas-guzzler in an age of twin jet efficiency. BA still stands by the old lady, and although it has slowly started to drawdown its fleet of 747s, it will be at least another five years by the time they've all disappeared, some after more than 25 years' service.

Progressively BA has been refreshing its long-haul fleet, introducing 12 Airbus A380s and 30-odd Dreamliners over the last decade, with a promise of the first of an order of Airbus A350s to come by July this year. This fleet evolution is, however, tectonically slow. Even if the Dreamliner I flew to San Jose on was just three years old, it too lacked WiFi. To me that’s like buying a new car in 2019 without electric windows. Waiting to depart at Heathrow's Terminal 5 is an opportunity to see just how old BA's long-haul fleet is. If you’re lucky you might see one of its A380s (IAG chief executive Willie Walsh has recently said they’d consider buying more of these wonderful, comfortable super jumbos, but Airbus needs to slash its prices first). Emirates, the much admired Middle East carrier has built its fleet strategy around the A380, with more than 100 on its roster with some 142 planned to be in service when deliveries end. Other airlines, like Lufthansa and Qantas, have hedged on their A380 needs like BA. From a passenger point of view it’s a popular type - especially for its comfort, despite the huge size, but its cost always needs balancing, which is why some airlines have been negotiating with Airbus for the smaller A350. Either way, at least they’ve got relatively new fleets overall.

Picture:  British Airways

As BA retires its 747s it will still be left with more than 50 Boeing 777s, by then averaging a lifespan of 22 years. Today, many of these long-haul workhorses show their relative old age, with loose fittings (on my flight back from Dubai in October), or entertainment systems that don’t work and if they do are wedded to screens the size of first-generation TomTom satnavs. Amenities like in-flight entertainment are what relegates BA and the American carriers. The Asian and Middle Eastern airlines are, once again, streets ahead. Even Virgin Atlantic has long been ahead of its great rival BA in this department, offering seatback TVs when BA was still using communal bulkhead screens in its 747 cabins. Virgin’s Upper Class and Premium Economy seats are still on par with the Asian and Gulf airlines, and even in a standard economy seat on Virgin you don’t feel as commoditised as you do with BA.

This begs the question of why I stick with BA. To be honest, I don’t know. Lounge access can be bought or built up through loyalty to other, better airlines. But it’s somewhat shabby that BA should have benefited from my slavish loyalty (and for much longer than the 16 years I’ve been an Executive Club member) and yet the list of woes gets longer with every flight. I’m not alone, either, in feeling this way. In a recent survey for the consumer association Which?, BA came third from bottom, a long way behind carriers such as Singapore, Emirates and even Virgin. BA will point to the improvements it is making to cabin quality as a sign that it is taking the customer experience seriously. But frequent BA passengers beg to differ. Yes, the First and Club World cabins are plush, but step back into World Traveller Plus (premium economy) and World Traveller on long-haul flights, and the experience diminishes somewhat, especially on aircraft where ten economy class seats are now crammed across a row, with those rows appearing significantly tighter for legroom.

Picture: British Airways

Here lies the most vexing aspect of British Airways. An airline seemingly stuck in a vortex of its own making. It still wants to be see as a premium 'flag carrier', and yet its business ethos is stuck somewhere between premium and budget. But BA - which is as margin-minded as any business of course - at least once operated with pricing that you felt was being matched by service quality. At best you'd say it was average today. Yes, its planes get you from A to B with a reasonable degree of punctuality (unless weather events force the airline to just shut down...). and unlike Ryanair or the American carriers, there is still a feeling that you are being somewhat looked after while on board. But there is an overall feeling of decay, of doing more for profit and shareholder dividends than for the paying customer (unless you're paying first or business class prices). Ageing planes and increasingly flimsy rewards for long-term loyalty don't help, either. More importantly, there are simply better airlines out there offering better value for money. No amount of slick marketing, or the claim of making its 100th year "very special" via an "ongoing £6.5bn investment programme to deliver new aircraft, cabins, service and destinations" make a dent in BA's diminishing reputation unless it makes these deliveries sooner, rather than later. The clock is ticking.

Stretching legs - why long-haul could be getting longer

As this blog commented on last month, air travel leaves much to be desired. For the most part, getting crammed into a toothpaste tube with wings is simply a necessary evil for those of us who have to travel for business or personal reasons.

Living and working in Paris and, increasingly, London, flying just about edges out taking the Eurostar between these two cities, a journey which, since last summer especially, has carried the considerable risk of the train getting stuck in or just outside the Channel Tunnel thanks to miscreants disrupting services in Calais (yeah, I know, desperate refugees escaping unspeakable horrors in their homeland getting in the way of my highfalutin' business meeting...). Call me precious but I really don't fancy the idea of being locked in a carriage without air conditioning or electricity for the nine or ten hours that some Eurostar passengers have been forced to endure while the authorities try and sort out track intrusions.

This does, however, bring me to a travel horror of a different sort: long-haul flying. Though my musings on aviation might suggest otherwise, I'm really not that well travelled. I've been to Asia just the once (via a fifteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Taiwan, on which, for the only time in my life, I managed to get some proper sleep courtesy of misreading the dosage instructions of sleeping pills I was offered). After that, the longest I've spent in the air has been between Europe and the US West Coast.

When I first flew from London to Los Angeles in 1992, I had barely been anywhere, let alone the other side of the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. I had no idea what 12 and a half hours sat in the smoking section of a Virgin 747 would be like, especially with a chain-smoking bit-part actor next to me, knocking back V&Ts like they were going out of fashion while boring me rigid about episodes of Murder She Wrote that he'd appeared in (since IMDB-verified, I have to admit). Until he passed out.

Nothing could prepare me for the world of disorientation that jet lag would induce for the first time. The next morning I drove out of my airport hotel and, instead of heading towards the 405 freeway and north to Hollywood, I drove east into South Central, barely months after the summer riots of 1992. A young English tourist conspiculously driving a shiny new Dodge Dynasty through Hawthorne was not the wisest decision jet lag could have mis-made for me. So, by the time I realised I was on Rosencrans Avenue, near its junction with Normandie Avenue and therefore epicentre of the trouble, I decided that a U-turn might be wise.

In the years since, including a spell living in California itself, I've grown used to the endlessness of flying out West from Europe, though these flights are becoming somewhat more tolerable as the aircraft servicing the routes have become newer and more efficient. However, I realise that these flights pale into insignificance when compared to other routes.

Last week an Airbus A380 of the Emirates airline made what is believed to be the longest non-stop scheduled commercial flight by distance (the record for duration is still held by a Quantas flight from Dallas to Sydney which took 16 hours and 55 minutes). However, this could be eclipsed by Emirates commencing a route from Dubai to Panama City (due to launch this month but postponed - again - until next year) that will clock in at 17 hours and 35 minutes, though this is still shorter by distance than the Auckland trip.

New planes with better engine technology are enabling these marathon flights, which no doubt benefit the bottom lines of the big carriers, such as the rapidly expanding Emirates and Qatar Airways, as well as Australia's Quantas which, through geographic necessity, has always had to be at the end of the longest routes on Earth.

But what do they do for the passengers? Given how the business of air travel is all about balancing profits with the passenger experience, the thought of spending three-quarters of a whole day crammed into an economy class seat fills me with mortal dread. Cabin innovations on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380 and A350 are supposed to improve cabin pressure, air circulation and even ambient light, but from my own experience, nothing can relieve the strain of being squashed into economy class rows, where the legroom has grown ever-tighter, and even the number of seats per row has increased.

Unless you have a generous employer or are one of those air miles nerds who apparently can fly anwhere in a premium cabin by some form of black art, long-haul really is not fun. And as economy class sections become more cramped, the armrest duels, the seat-recline mind games and the awkward social etiquette of getting past (or clambering over) two or even four other sleeping passengers to get to the toilet during a very long-haul flight is the stuff of nightmares.

Twitter/Christopher Adams

The New Zealand Herald's Christopher Adams live blogged from the Emirates Dubai-Auckland flight to see how his fellow passengers were holding up, though he admits that he had booked into business class, making any immediate drawbacks around him of the sixteen-and-a-half-hour flight a clear case of 'First World problems'.

Exploring the economy cabin, Adams didn't see any greater suffering than any other long-haul flight. The 500-seat A380 wasn't completely full, either, possibly the result of fuel economy weight restrictions (Emirates will fly the smaller Boeing 777 on this route on a regular basis).

This begs the question of whether such a non-stop journey of endurance would be popular to begin with. Super-long distance flights, such as those from European cities to Australia or New Zealand, get broken up by layovers in Dubai or Doha. Some choose to stop off for a day in Los Angeles or San Francisco. Personally, I'd say that was sensible, even if it did cut down on time at the eventual destination. All I know is that if I ever brave the journey Down Under - a trip fraught with claustrophobia on the way and the world's deadliest things that could kill you when you get there - I could never do the journey in one go, even if the technology existed for an airliner to fly non-stop.

As it is, there is no shortage of routes, notably starting out in the Middle East, which clock in at over 8,000 miles, and which require supreme stamina to endure in all but the most luxurious of flying classes. Perhaps its no surprise, then, how airlines like Emirates and Qatar, with their reputation for opulance in the premium seats, can sustain flying the current crop of jumbo jets from Dubai to Auckland, Los Angeles or Houston. These airlines advertise themselves as being luxury experiences - one has a TV commercial suggesting that your travel itinerary could take you to New York before whisking yourself off to a tropical island in the South Pacific, before you then travel to Dubai. Clearly, this particular airline's advertising agency had no demographic in mind that would fly anything less than first class, because putting in the miles like that in the cattle section would surely not be any fun at all.