Tag Archives: British Airways

Carbon offsetting

British Airways gave us the option of paying extra for carbon credits to make up for our air travel. We didn’t take them up on the offer.

There are a number of reasons why I feel carbon offsetting is a bad thing. The first is that by removing the guilt, it encourages people to continue a profligate lifestyle, rather than actually changing their behavior.

For example, if Al Gore genuinely gave a crap about the environment, he would stop flying by private jet so much. But no, he’s rich and can simply buy carbon credits to salve his conscience. Similarly, John Edwards will happily lecture to ordinary people that they should give up their SUVs, then get into his own SUV secure in the knowledge that he’s bought carbon credits to make up for his own indulgence.

(In fact, Edwards owns 3 SUVs — a Ford Escape, a Cadillac SRX, and a Chrysler Pacifica — plus a pickup.)

The second reason why I dislike carbon credits is that there are much more effective ways to reduce emissions. For instance, if British Airways really cared, they would stop painting their aircraft. A fully painted 747 weighs 443kg extra, compared to around 100kg for me plus my luggage. That’s before you factor in the increased wind resistance from cracked and peeling paint, the chemicals needed for stripping and repainting aircraft, and the disposal problem of the dissolved paint and chemicals. [Update: BA could also stop flying empty planes across the Atlantic.]

The third reason why carbon credits are a dubious idea is pointed out by spiked online. When you buy carbon credits for your flight from Climate Care, what you’re actually doing is paying a bunch of Indian families to dig in the dirt via back-breaking manual labor, and pump water manually, rather than using modern farm equipment. Now, it might not be a bad idea if I personally spent some time stomping on pedals to pump water, but I don’t see why Indians should be bribed to do it so I can feel less guilty about air travel.

But my favorite argument against carbon credits is the parody site cheatneutral. If the logic behind carbon credits is really valid, why not buy some infidelity credits and cheat on your partner with a clean conscience?

Flying back to England

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

Flight from hell

I’ve had some pretty hellish experiences on plane flights. I’ve traveled from the UK to the USA while suffering from the ‘flu, on a plane filled with rowdy cheerleaders. I’ve been trapped for several hours on a motionless plane in Chicago, with all the ventilation and air conditioning turned off. However, a recent news story is putting my experiences into perspective.

An elderly woman died near the start of a flight from India. British Airways propped up the body in a spare seat in first class. The first class passengers then had to deal with not just the presence of the corpse, but also the corpse’s daughter, who spent the remainder of the 9 hour flight sobbing inconsolably.

Then once the plane landed, they all had to sit there for an extra hour until a coroner could verify that they hadn’t caught anything from the corpse.

One passenger complained to British Airways. Their official response is that he should “get over” it. Nice.

Sometimes a variable name is just a variable name

OK, this is the most obsessive e-mail I’ve received in a long, long time:

I read your HUMAN_DNA.H from GNU humor pages, and I like it very much. However, I don’t get it why you name Penis variable *jt, and Vagina *p? Does jt and p stand for anything?

Any complaints about the humorous quality of the joke should, of course, be addressed to British Airways, Ingrams Drive, Redditch.

I must confess that there is an extra layer of joke hidden there. JT stands for “John Thomas”, an expression any Monty Python fan knows. P is left as an exercise for the reader.

This e-mail has reminded me of the fact that what I write tends to end up multi-layered whether I intend it or not, because jokes and connections which make perfect sense to me often get missed by other people. However, I’m generally a pretty straightforward person, and say what I mean.

You might think that’s a contradiction—but the way I write, the subtext usually exists to enhance the main message, or is irrelevant wordplay. Is that duplicitous?

St Petersburg, intro and day 1

I was lucky enough to visit Russia about a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in the summer of 1993. My girlfriend at the time had lived and studied in Leningrad, and had made friends with a family there. We decided to go visit them.

Day 1

We arrive at Leningrad airport. It has “ST PETERSBURG” on the top in obviously brand new letters.

I see row after row of identical Aeroflot planes. Our British Airways plane taxis for about half a kilometer around the outside of the old ‘external’ airport, to the main airport building. Apparently now that people can travel, they don’t feel a need to physically separate international and domestic flights.

The plane stops and sits for a while. Eventually, someone comes back, having found some steps. Some soldiers stand and watch us as we disembark.

We fill out some customs forms to declare what we’re bringing into the country. The form is an old USSR one, and it’s fairly obvious that nobody is taking customs very seriously any more; they just make us complete the official Soviet paperwork because, well, it’s their job, and they haven’t been told to do anything else. Their asses having been covered, we clear customs and immigration quite quickly.

We meet up with Olga, her husband Alexei, and their daughter Natasha. We learn that Alexei’s car has broken down, and the garage has refused to even try to repair it, saying it needs a new body. Hence, we find ourselves squeezing onto a yellow bendy bus full of Russians.

The electric bus rattles along the streets, which could apparently use some maintenance. They look brown and dusty. The ballast of the bus’s electrical system is apparently completely shot, and the back of the bus is filled with an eerie electronic whining noise that rises and falls in pitch depending on what the bus is doing. This turns out to be a common feature of Russian buses; I name it “The Song Of The Lonely Bus” and find myself wishing I had a tape recorder…

We switch to the Metro. When the train arrives there are doors in the walls which open up, followed by the doors of the train a few moments later. I find myself wondering if the two sets of doors ever fail to line up.

Ascending from the Metro by escalator is rather like the stairway to heaven scene in the classic movie “A Matter Of Life And Death”. Unlike the Underground in London, there are no posters here to give a sense of scale; when you look to the side, the lights continue as far as the eye can see.

The apartment block where Olga and family live looks a lot like the ones in East Berlin—but even more so. The outside is run down, crumbling, faded and shabby. The stairwells are unlit—the lights have been ripped out. The lift isn’t working. We walk up to the fourth floor. I notice a faint smell of urine in the stairwell, like Watford car park. We climb nine flights of stairs in all.

I’m a bit nervous as to what we’ll find, but the apartment turns out to be nice inside, though very obviously Eastern Europe.

Olga and Alexei have moved into the main room, and given me and XQ the bedroom. Olga’s mother and Natasha are sleeping in the remaining room. The “bathroom” is a shower that has been bolted onto the side of the kitchen by Alexei.

This is, by Russian standards, a luxury apartment. Three whole rooms, plus a kitchen! Originally this was three separate communal apartnments with a shared kitchen. Olga’s family got the other two when their neighbors moved out; fortunately for them they had connections, and grandma survived the Siege of Leningrad, so the second time they applied for more space they managed to get preferential treatment because of her war hero status and the fact that they had a child.

It’s time to eat, and we are given special treats: fresh fish to start with; sprats, to be precise. Unfortunately the main course turns out to be some kind of meat dish in jelly.

I had already decided that I would give up being vegetarian for the duration of the trip. It’s hard enough for Russian families to get food at all, without putting crazy demands on them. So I try to eat the jellied meat, really I do. I just can’t manage it, though. I’ve always had a problem with anything that has a texture like fat, and the jelly sets off my gag reflex. I realize that if I try to force it down, I’ll end up vomiting. I opt to survive on bread and vegetables.

We go out at 1a.m. and find that it’s still light. We walk down to the riverfront and watch the bridges to the island being raised. Wispy clouds drift in front of the moon, moonlight sparkles on the water, and the gilded dome of St Isaac’s Cathedral glitters against the blue-orange sky. A ship passes through the bridge.

Alexei has a Russian clone of a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, as well as a radiation meter and a four band (shortwave) radio. Natasha tries to teach me the alphabet for a while, then we all go to bed.

The paper that backed Fascism

On the plane home, there was only one British paper to choose from—the Daily Mail.

XQ had taken a copy of the Mail with her when she left for Germany; she had wanted to be able to show the German kids what a British tabloid newspaper was like, but had been too embarrassed to buy The Sun. As luck would have it, that day the Mail had had a two-page spread by Paul ‘Why oh why” Johnson, entitled “What if we had made peace with Hitler?” and detailing how Sir Winston Churchill would have been publicly executed as a traitor.

The copy of the Daily Mail I got to read on the plane was almost as frothing. “Plans are underway,” it revealed, “to rebuild Hitler’s Reichstag as the centre of a united Germany.”

Well, not quite. Firstly, the Reichstag was almost entirely rebuilt long ago. What they’re planning is to do something about the glass dome on the roof, which was never replaced after we bombed the shit out of it at the end of the Second World War.

Secondly, it makes as much sense to talk about “Hitler’s Reichstag” as it does to talk about “Thatcher’s House of Commons”; the Reichstag was the centre of German government at least as far back as the nineteenth century. In fact, it was the burning down of the Reichstag in 1933 that Hitler used as an excuse to suspend constitutional rights; the Nazis found a convenient scapegoat and decided he was guilty of arson, although the suspicion is that they burnt the building down themselves.

This twisted little article was only a side-attraction, though; most of the rest of the page was taken up by the story of the Russian journalist who had supposedly found bits of Hitler’s skull in a box in some KGB archives. The Mail was obviously very excited, and included some real big pictures of Hitler, with dotted lines showing which bits had been found.

I found myself wondering what on earth the plane’s German passengers must have thought of the Daily Mail’s articles. The question was answered when I overheard a voice from the next row of seats: “I’ve got a copy of the Guardian here. Who wants to start the bidding?”

I certainly knew when I was back in Britain. We arrived at Heathrow a quarter of an hour early, because German air traffic control had been unusually efficient. We then had to wait three quarters of an hour for British Airways staff to unload our baggage. BA claims that it doesn’t have enough baggage handlers; but curiously, it sacked half of the ones it used to have last year, doubtless so that Lord King could have his golden handshake.

Eventually I collected my luggage. The next day the coach to Cambridge was half an hour late. I almost wonder why I came back.