The Journey Matters

Introduction

Chicago O'Hare Airport, 1740 hrs, 9th April 2017

Boarded and fully booked, United Express Flight 3411 to Louisville, Kentucky, operated by Republic Airways on behalf of the United Airlines subsidiary, was at its gate ready for departure. A sky bully came on board the Embraer 170 jet and said four passengers had to give up their seats. The airline wanted these for its own staff. There were no volunteers, even when a first offer of $400 compensation was raised to $800.

In the end, four passengers were selected by computer to be bumped. Three complied, but the fourth, Dr David Dao - a 69-year-old doctor who was flying back to Kentucky to see patients the following morning - was unwilling to give up his seat. So, instead, he was wrestled from it by three baseball-capped operatives. Dragged unconscious along the aisle, his nose and two of his teeth broken, blood trickling down his face, the doctor was taken off the aircraft. Fellow passengers filmed this malevolent scene on their mobile phones. Videos would go viral on YouTube, although not before Dr Dao had managed to re-board the aircraft. This time, the wounded, concussed and evidently distraught medic was dispatched on a stretcher.

Airline staff took their hard-won seats. Flight 3411 departed O'Hare two hours late. A later press statement claimed that the airline had simply been 're-accommodating' passengers, and a leaked internal email said that employees had 'followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this'. Who could think of criticizing United's Oscar Munoz, the very model of a modern airline CEO, with years of experience working for AT&T, Coca-Cola and Pepsi? The previous month, PRWeek magazine had named him its 'Communicator of the Year'. He held an MBA degree from Pepperdine University, a devoutly Christian college near Malibu, California.

The following month, United flew more passengers than it had a year earlier. It posted significant gains in passenger miles flown, and recorded the fewest cancellations in its history. The airline's share price hit an all-time high. Warren Buffett, the veteran business magnate and a major investor in airline stocks, told Fortune that although United had made a 'terrible mistake' over the Dao affair, the public wanted cheap seats. This meant 'high-load factors' and, for passengers, a 'fair amount of discomfort'.

A gun barrel of online US commentators said, in no uncertain terms, that Dr Dao deserved every injury and humiliation that came his way. How dare he delay other passengers and obstruct an all-American corporation going about its lawful business? As for the assault on the doctor, one of his three assailants, the aviation security officer James Long, felt he had been unfairly dismissed as a result of attempts by United Airlines to placate those Americans, including President Donald Trump, who said its methods had been wrong.

Long took legal action against United Airlines and Chicago's Department of Aviation, claiming that he had not been trained properly in the handling of out-of-line passengers. How was he to know that violence against them was inappropriate and that, in this case, he wasn't following 'established procedures'?

'Drive,' commented one online reader in response to CNN's coverage of the story, 'and, if you cannot, then consider flying in a cramped seat with surly airline employees treating you like animal-cargo.'

When anyone complains, they are reminded - whether by Warren Buffett or fellow travellers - that they cannot expect commercial flight to be as it was in the days of silver service, adequate legroom and well-spoken, Grace Kelly-lookalike stewardesses with impeccable manners.

What has changed is the way in which, as perceived by the majority of passengers, airlines have abandoned, along with common decency, any notion of the romance or poetry of flight. For Michael O'Leary, the never-less-than-controversial CEO of the European budget airline Ryanair, passengers are in cahoots with this change: 'Most people just want to get from A to B. You don't want to pay £500 for a flight. You want to spend that money on a nice hotel, apartment or restaurant. you don't want to piss it all away at the airport or on the airline.' Of Ryanair, he says: 'Anyone who thinks [our] flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things.'

For O'Leary, the romance of flight has long been in the grave, where it deserves to rot. 'Air transport,' he told BusinessWeek Online in 2002, 'is just a glorified bus operation.' As Alfred E. Kahn, the American economist who became known as the 'father of airline deregulation', had said a quarter of a century before: 'I really don't know one plane from the other. To me they are just marginal costs with wings.'

Robert L. Crandall, the president and CEO of American Airlines from 1985 to 1998 and a fierce critic of deregulation, called the airline industry 'a nasty, rotten business'. And Al Gore, back when he was vice president of the United States, stated: 'Airplane travel is nature's way of making you look like your passport photo.'

If they (or their employers) can afford it, passengers can, of course, fly in anodyne, faux-posh first class. And yet, to echo O'Leary's thinking, who - unless they are travelling on expenses - would want to fritter away thousands of pounds on a first-class ticket now that the very concept of 'first class' no longer means what it did in decades gone by?

On and off, for more than a decade, I have ridden Liverpool Street to Norwich expresses. These trains have long been busy, to the point in recent years where standard-class passengers who are paying through their noses are forced to stand for long distances. When supplementary fares were available on weekdays, I'd 'upgrade' to first class.

It wasn't so many years ago that these trains offered breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea. Paper tablecloths might have replaced linen at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and silver cutlery may have been a thing of the distant past, and yet there was still something of a half-remembered air of first-class travel in these East Anglian dining cars. By the second decade of the century, the restaurant cars had gone. And so what on earth - or in Greater Anglia - was the point of first class?

When I lived in the Scottish Highlands, I'd drive south to Inverness to take the Caledonian Sleeper to London. The sleepers were time-worn, yet clean and well maintained. The Scottish stewards were cheerful. The bar car was fun, with a varying cast over the seasons of MPs and lairds, fishermen, artists and writers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, oil riggers, architects, and American and Japanese tourists. Although not first class in a contemporary 'top celebrity VIP' manner, the Caledonian Sleeper had the charm and elan of a less-bullish era.

But while waiting at Euston for the staff of the return Caledonian Sleeper to let waifs and strays like me on board, the best option was always to perch on a luggage trolley or lean against a column on the bare concrete platform and read. Even on the coldest winter evening, that utilitarian platform was - to me at least - more first class than the Hieronymus Bosch-style 'First-Class Lounge'.

Many of the journeys I've made in Britain and around the world have been by penny-plain and matter-of-fact boats, trains, planes, taxis and hire cars. By foot and on bicycle, too. It hasn't mattered that a train or ferry has been spartan, if the scenery, people, weather or occasion itself has been special. These, though, have been very different journeys to those made by forms of transport in which passengers are synonymous with cargo, and when our sole interest appears to be to get from A to B as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

One of my favourite books since I first read it in a public library as a child - I then bought a second-hand copy in a Brooklyn bookstore years later - is Charles Small's Far Wheels. Published in 1955, it evokes the steam railway journeys that Small made while working for the American oil industry in the Congo (the Chemins de fer du Kivu, 'a 60-mile narrow gauge streak of rust'), Madagascar, Mozambique, Fiji, Jamaica, the backwaters of Japan and blazing East Africa.

I have wanted every place I have been to - whether the Aleutian Islands or Zennor, Doncaster or Dimapur, Lecce or Llandrindod Wells, Zapopan or Arnos Grove - to be particular and special. Far too much twenty-first-century travel is homogenous in character. It is now possible to travel more or less around the world by more or less identical Boeing or Airbus jets from one more or less identical airport to another, to stay at the same chain hotels, and to ride the same high-speed trains on dedicated tracks - as travel by picturesque regional railways declines - and to eat identical food at the same chain restaurants while wearing the same clothes as pretty much everyone else.

I mentioned the East Anglian main line from Liverpool Street to Norwich. From 2019, its express services have been run not by individual class 90 electric locomotives and their trains of British Rail Mark 3 coaches, but by flavourless - if hopefully efficient - electric multiple units. What I'll lament when I use these trains is not so much the fact that, in terms of rolling stock, an old order is yielding to new - all things must pass - but a...