It's oh so quiet

Serenity is not something you associate with crisis. And, yet, opening the bedroom curtains this morning, that's exactly what I encountered. The sky was poster paint blue, the sunshine bright and inviting, and a pair of postmen traded banter from an appropriate social distance, delivering to opposite sides of the street. The usual hustle and bustle of this London suburb has dropped off a cliff. Our turn-of-the-century street in the "village", as the town is referred to (despite being well within the capital), had almost been returned to its original state, save for the scattering of residents' cars parked up and down it.

Yesterday was the same - the silence only occasionally broken by frantic delivery vans charging over the speed humps, their drivers desperate to make the next dump-and-run as part of their new game of contact-free Knock Down Ginger. Even though we're in the midst of a medical crisis, the urban soundtrack of emergency vehicle sirens around here has also been turned right down. On any given day, living close to a high street and its intersection with another local artery, ambulance, police and fire engine sirens are an almost constant cacophony as they battle their way through choked streets. But not now. It is eerie. People really are staying at home.

The other notable silence is in the air. When Heathrow is running takeoffs from its easterly runways, there is usually a steady stream of planes in their initial climb overhead our part of south-west London. But not any more. Last night the quiet was broken only by a helicopter. It reminds me of Tuesday 11 September, 2001. I was living in Sunnyvale in California, in an area served by three international airports - San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose. On any given day there are hundreds of planes in that airspace, including flights making their 180-degree turns over Sunnyvale itself to line up for landing at SFO. 9/11 unfolded in real time for me. Having been awake, unusually, at 6am and watching CNN as I eat breakfast, a report came in of a plane hitting one of the World Trade Center towers in New York. Initially it was assumed to be a light aircraft or one of the many helicopters that fly up and down the Hudson River, delivering banking executives to Manhattan's heliports, or taking tourists on sight-seeing flights. Very quickly it became something else.

By 6.45am my time, the Federal Aviation Authority had grounded all commercial aircraft within the continental United States. It was a full twelve hours later that I emerged from the apartment for some fresh air, having spent the day in my pyjamas, frantically channel-hopping to see if any one broadcaster had more news than the others. My break for freedom was to drive up the 101 freeway, with no particular destination in mind, just a desire to see something other than my living room. It was as I drove that I noticed how clear the skies were, and how clear the freeway was. One of the San Francisco Peninsular's two main motorways was notably free-flowing at a time of day when traffic would normally be solid. On an impulse, I came off the 101 at Millbrae and drove up to Junipero Serra Park, which has a view over to SFO. It was then that I fully realised how silent it was. Nothing overhead, nothing moving on the ground. Planes that had been given the 'All Stop' order appeared to be scattered all over the airport's taxiways, like toys abandoned by a child ordered to the dinner table.

That night, around 2am, I was woken by the noise of a jet aircraft flying overhead. The nights were warm in California that September, so I'd left a bedroom window open. As the jet - possibly a fighter - approached, I felt myself bracing. No one knew for sure if that morning's attacks had ended, and middle-of-the-night paranoia meant that there was a fair chance that whatever was approaching could be heading for San Francisco, or the heart of Silicon Valley or, frankly, anywhere. The next morning we gathered at the Philips campus in Sunnyvale, everyone numbed by the previous day's events, all trying to get some collective semblance of understanding of what had happened on the other side of the country. Everyone who lived in the South Bay reported the same experience as mine, of being woken by the sound of an aircraft, and wondering where it might go.

That Wednesday morning we all assembled around the campus barbecue pit (about as Silicon Valley as you get) for an impromptu moment of sombre reflection and to sing (or, in my case, attempt to sing) the Star-Spangled Banner, the US national anthem before returning to our desks and try to get on with some work. I remained there for a few minutes longer, still trying to get my head around the lack of noise in the sky. Amid the continuing uncertainty, the calm, the beatific calm, was as unnerving as it was peaceful. Today, outside this house, it is a reassurance that people are paying attention to the instruction to stay at home. Or, at least, they are in this village.

The real birth of cool

Most things described as being “cool” are often - if not only - regarded as being so by those seemingly self-appointed to be arbiters of what is cool. Which isn’t cool. One of the reasons I stopped buying men’s fashion magazines wasn’t so much the photography of ridiculously priced clobber, but the assumption that those who wrote and produced such magazines were somehow above the rest of us who, by nature, are not cool. Oh, and I’m not cool to begin with.

However, there are some things that are so intrinsically cool they don’t even need highlighting. They just exude cool. The Amalfi Coast, for example. Bass Wejun loafers. Soho. James Bond. Fonzie. Perhaps each to their own, but these would, I’d hesitate to suggest, feature on an untouchable list of cool things all of their own. Along with two others: Steve McQueen and his unquestionably cool crime thriller Bullitt, which was came out this day, 50 years ago.

What makes Bullitt cool is both a sum of its parts as well as the whole. McQueen sits at the centre of this hypothesis. The actor was and - face facts, Brad Pitt, Bradley Cooper and any other pretender to the throne named Brad or Bradley - remains the coolest actor in Hollywood history. Not Newman, Redford, Pacino or any contemporary registers on the same level of cool. By the time McQueen strapped on Lieutenant Frank Bullitt's shoulder holster he’d already set the bar for cool in The Great Escape, appropriately as PoW Hilts “the Cooler king” (and, even earlier, in The Magnificent Seven). But his starring role as the monosyllabic San Francisco detective in Peter Yates’ 1968 thriller notched the cool factor up, quite considerably. The cool factor begins with McQueen's wardrobe - his Sunday attire (the day being a key part of the plot) comprising a perennially cool rollneck sweater and what were then known as “slacks”, topped off with a three-quarter length trenchcoat. Cool on top of cool on top of cool.

Then there’s that car, a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback in Racing Green, which stars in the greatest - and coolest - car chase in cinema history*.  If you’ve never seen the film - and if not, why not? - it’s a frenetic, ten-minute sequence which covers a series of streets in San Francisco which, if you know the city at all won’t make any geographical sense, but thanks to some superb direction and editing, provides an exhilarating, tyre-squealing, rubber-burning tour, from its prowling start on Army Street before hill-bouncing its way out of North Beach towards a fiery conclusion for the baddies on the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in San Bruno. When I lived in the Bay Area I occupied an idle Sunday afternoon by trying to recreate the chase route, albeit with greater regard for stop signs than McQueen’s character did. It was, not surprisingly, impossible to cover in the 10 minutes and 53 seconds of screen time the chase occupied in the film, but a lot of fun, especially while listening to the Bullitt's Lalo Schifrin soundtrack (itself, achingly cool). Proportionately it takes up a fraction of the film, but hats off to Yates for making it such a pinnacle of cinematic action. And to think he was the man who directed Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday…
*fact

Bullitt has become an iconic entry in every petrolhead's catalogue of must-see films, but it also provided the template for others to follow. William Friedkin was such a fan that he was he inspired by it for the car chases in both The French Connection and To Live And Die In LA. No wonder there is a plethora of websites devoted to mapping the course of that Mustang as McQueen chases the Mob hitmen across San Francisco in their Dodge Charger. The Ford Motor Company's marketing department hasn’t been shy about exploiting the Mustang's defining role in the film, building on the resurgent muscle car on American streets by introducing a special Bullitt edition of the car to coincide with the film's anniversary. Nice idea, but I very much doubt it will replicate the grunt of the original car driven by McQueen on screen.

Vehicular cool not withstanding, there is so much more of the frosty stuff to Bullitt than just a muscular ten minutes of extreme roadcraft. There is, for a start, a smart plot and its undercurrent of Mob retribution and political ambition (courtesy of the wonderful Robert Vaughn as the slimy Walter Chalmers in an utterly brilliant - and cool - performance. San Francisco itself must be recognised as another cool character in the film, though the Yates' choice of locations is never designed to act as a tourist promotion of a city regarded by many as their favourite in America for its laid-back nature (in spite of the threat of widespread tectonic devastation), dramatic topography, ornate architecture and a sky of a shade of blue all of its own (paler than elsewhere on the West Coast due, I’m told, to unique atmospherics above it).

Like that other embittered San Francisco cop of few words, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan in Dirty Harry, released three years after Bullitt, McQueen's character is framed by his personal life, living on TV dinners bought from VJ Groceries across the road from his apartment at 1153-1157 Taylor Street. The grocery store even manages to provide one of the film's coolest moments - a single tracking shot which follows Bullitt out of the shop and across the road without even leaving the premises, watching the detective from behind its front window. It is details like this that make up the sum of the parts of why Bullitt is such a brilliant film and, of course, so cool.

Until his death in 1980 McQueen wouldn’t make another film as good, or play a character as cool as Frank Bullitt. And while actors tend to get judged on the body of their work, I could live with Bullitt being the only film McQueen made, not because he was a good or bad actor, but because it was such a singularly cool film. Some are like that (I can and do watch Heat whenever it appears in the television schedules, despite the fact I own it on multiple formats and have probably seen it more often than my own front door). Perhaps that is even the definition of cool, something that transcends everything else to stand out and stand up to repeat inspection. I know that I will never tire of watching Bullitt, enjoying its subtleties and its grand gestures in equal measure. But, if I think about it, mostly for Steve McQueen. Who was, in case you haven’t gathered by now, just bloody cool.

Computer says no. Again.

Picture: British Airways

When Robert Louis Stevenson wrote “for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive” he probably wasn’t considering flying any distance in economy class. Airlines today are so cost-conscious (i.e. profit-minded) that those utopian days of the proletariat joining the jet-set are now a distant memory as we cram into 10-abreast seats too narrow, and in rows so tight we resemble the enmeshed and entangled bodies of Picasso’s Guernica.

Now, I know what an elitist (and faintly pretentious) thing that is to say, but as my new job will involve frequent international travel, which means flying economy in accordance with responsible company rules (unless upgrades can be scored by a combination of personal cash and general obsequiousness at the gate...), I have a vested interest. And because the majority of my airline loyalty points are with dear old British Airways, I will probably be defaulting to the creaking flag carrier, just to maintain my lounge status. Yes, that’s just how shallow frequent flyers are. Except that BA, once the “world’s favourite airline”, no longer is. In fact, events - largely, it would appear, of their own making - have contrived to make BA anything but.

BA's CEO Alex Cruz will probably be glad to see the back of September: earlier this month he had apologise before the media after it transpired that BA’s website had been hacked - possibly over the course of several days - during which data including customers’ e-mail addresses and credit card information (including critical three-digit CVV codes) was lifted, affecting some 380,000 transactions. Just this last weekend the airline suffered yet another “technical issue with some of our internal systems” (or ‘IT failure’ in clearer parlance) at its hub, Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. Once again, this led to horrendous check-in queues and delays of up to two hours (“slight”, according to BA) to flights all over the world as computers managing the entire bag drop-to-boarding process fell over.

Twitter, as ever, bore the brunt of passengers’ frustrations: journalist Andrew Neil vented: “Yet another computer failure at Terminal 5 Heathrow for British Airways. Now regular occurrence. Flights delayed. Usual shambles, not yet on huge scale.” I’d hardly call it “regular”, but BA’s recent history of IT disasters certainly warrants the “shambles” part. “I think somebody at your organisation should press Ctrl+Alt+Delete and just start again,” another tweeted. BA strenuously denied that computer failure was at fault, calling it a “temporary glitch with some of our internal systems”. In other words, an IT failure.

IT problems have been at the core of BA’s worsening reputation in recent years. Having rolled out its new “cost-effective” ‘BA FLY’ IT system in 2015, it has been beset with problems. Employees reported it breaking within only a few weeks of coming onstream, leading to heavy delays at Heathrow and Gatwick. Almost a year later, on 7 July, 2016, the system suffered another failure, causing enormous queues for check-in at Heathrow. The system was to break down twice more that month, and again the following September, causing problems for the airline throughout the world. And then, in May this year, BA suffered its most reputation-damaging outage to date, when an employee error brought down the BA network leaving 75,000 passengers, their luggage and their planes stranded around the world, leading to 670 cancelled flights and a heavy dent in BA’s profits to boot. It’s easy to blame IT failures, but then again, they shouldn’t be happening so often to all the ‘mission-critical’ parts of an airline’s day-to-day operations, like check-in, baggage and boarding. And a multi-million pound retail activity like a national flag carrier's website, shouldn't be getting so comprehensively compromised by hackers. The suspicion is that penny-pinching, as BA obsessively tries to compete with budget airlines like easyJet and Ryanair, is undoing the reputation of an airline that once justifiably claimed to be one of the world’s best.

It’s no accident that most of my frequent flyer miles are with BA, built up mainly over the 17 years I lived abroad and made frequent trips back to the UK. However, over those years, the quality of BA’s service has noticeably eroded, and not just when ‘turning right’ into the supposedly cheap seats. Eager to cram in as many people has possible, even BA’s business class cabin has shrunk, squeezing rows tighter. Business class is where any airline makes its money, but without the high volume of economy passengers, a global carrier like BA would struggle. On short-haul flights, economy passengers now have to pay for snacks. This might be expected on budget airlines, but even when those sandwiches come from Marks and Spencer, it only adds to the cheapening of the BA product.The airline is also somewhat behind on what it provides for long-haul flights: the other week I flew to San Francisco on a 22-year-old Boeing 747. It’s a dear old aircraft - perhaps my favourite widebody still flying - but is definitely showing its age. Even BA's inclusion - finally! - of inflight WiFi on the outbound flight (notably missing on the return trip…) and a refresh of the seats doesn’t mask the fact that other airlines are streets ahead in bringing new planes into their fleets. But even where BA has introduced new aircraft, there are mixed results.

Picture: British Airways

A while ago I flew to Newark in New Jersey from Heathrow in one of BA’s new Boeing 787 Dreamliners, an aircraft much vaunted for innovations to enhance passenger comfort. The reality was that, flying in economy, it was probably the most uncomfortable flight I’ve ever experienced. Similar complaints can be found online of BA’s Dreamliner service between London and San Jose (a return journey on such planes I’ll be taking at the end of October...). Rather than being a sumptuous experience, BA has, it would appear, crammed as many revenue-bearing seats and rows into the 787 as possible. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to it, to the extent that when I repeat the trip to California in December I’ll be booking myself back onto the ageing 747, flying to San Francisco and putting up with a long hour on the 101 freeway to get down to San Jose.

Of course, I have options. Even with corporate travel, there are probably better options with other airlines, but these will almost certainly involve either American carriers (to avoid at all costs) or time- and patience-sapping stopovers where, inevitably, luggage will go missing, to be retrieved usually after the trip is complete. And now I think of it, BA’s history of losing luggage is not one to be proud of.

Whether they admit it or not (and I’m still prepared to defend it), BA has lost its sheen. Middle-eastern airlines like Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, have long eclipsed BA for service, comfort and innovations. Likewise one or two of the Asian carriers, like Singapore and Cathay Pacific. In Europe, I’ve had better experience with Air France, KLM and Lufthansa, carriers of similar or equal historical standing to BA. CNN’s business and travel reporter Richard Quest recently blogged that BA-bashing is “a national pastime”, saying that its status as a national institution put it on a similar par to the BBC or the Church of England for sniping. But having travelled almost exclusively with BA for many, many years, its decline - while not necessarily acute - has been palpable. A spoon fewer here, a more basic meal there - it all adds up. Quest points out that BA is, at least, refreshing its fleet with newer, more efficient planes like the Airbus A380, the Dreamliner and the A350 (which, in the example of the Finnair examples I’ve been on, is extremely comfortable), but if it is just going to squeeze in the maximum number of economy seats as possible, as my experience already of a BA 787 has found, all they are doing is putting Ryanair-standard cabins in the air on premium routes.

Picture: British Airways

Not everyone can fly in business class, and yet those of us flying economy on corporate tickets have often forked out business class pricing, as business travel agents tend to book expensive, fully flexible tickets, rather than the cheap-and-cheerful prices we see as consumers when booking our holidays. I have no problem with budget airlines: easyJet and BA’s own stablemate, Vueling, are perfectly fine for travelling down to the Mediterranean, for work or pleasure. But for long distances, the sort of flights that made BA the national flag carrier to begin with, there’s a sense of non-premium passengers being treated like commodities. I recognise the argument that we, as travellers, want to fly for the least amount of money possible, but I also think that if you want no-frills, you fly with a no-frills carrier (like Norwegian). For what British Airways charges for its longer flights, you’d have thought that passenger comfort - for those of us who ‘turn right’, would be given more attention.

As Quest points out in his post, BA will be 100 years old next year, “a perfect chance to turbo charge the necessary changes”. It was, once, a pioneer, introducing things like premium economy, in which you can ‘almost’ experience business class without paying the high price. Perhaps with a little premium thinking BA could do something about overhauling its currently bruised reputation, both on the ground and in the air.

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.