TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

Seat Quest 2010: The Flight

My first thought on the plane was “Oh man, Club Class on this flight looks just like the lowly World Traveller Plus.” Then, “Oh, that was World Traveller Plus. This is Club Class.”

Not really seats, even, but pods. Each faces the opposite way to its neighbour, so you’re left staring a stranger in the face. That’s okay, though, because a frosted glass barrier can be electricly erected between you, shooting up in nested layers like spacecraft armour. I worried a while about how to do this politely, until the person opposite did it impolitely.

FINE. Didn’t want to look at YOUR stupid face EITHER. This is how Club Class people behave: I’d only been a Club Class person for a few hours, and I’d already been planning to do the same.

The barrier seemed less like a useful feature and more like a diabolical social experiment. Take two strangers who have no reason to look at each other, sit them so they’re looking at each other, then wait to see who presses the button first. Neither of you mind, really, but unless you live to see the great cyber shunning of 2073, it’s about the only time in your life a perfect stranger will tell a robot that they don’t want to look at your face anymore.

This photo is annotated, but I can’t find a good way of embedding annotations. Click it instead.

The legroom is so preposterous that once you’ve done up your seatbelt, trying to retrieve your Highlife magazine from the seatback pocket in front of you looks like a baby straining at his pram buckle for some unreachable sweet. And it isn’t a seatback pocket so much as a fold-down footrest that completes your full length bed when you fully recline. For this reason your tray folds down from the side on an adjustable rail, running from directly in front of you to the position Club Class people refer to as “the fuck out of my way”.

The only apparent drawback was that I couldn’t put anything under my seat, because the reclining mechanism took up all the space, and I couldn’t put anything under the seat in front of me, because there wasn’t one in walking distance. I’d have to board a much smaller plane and fly there to deposit it.

The drawback was solved by an actual drawer. I had a drawer. I wasn’t just sitting there, I was moving in.

It was one of those ten hour flights that just flew by. You know – the ones that never happen. Apart from a very Club Class incident in which I managed to restrain myself from shouting “WELL IF YOU DON’T HAVE THE FUCKING POUILLY-FUME, WHY THE FUCK IS IT ON THIS FUCKING WINE LIST? HALF THIS SHIT IS SAUVIGNON, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME ALL YOU’VE GOT IS FUCKING GRIGIO? I WANT THE DELICATE FUCKING HONEYSUCKLE AROMAS GODDAMMIT.” I barely noticed the time.

And oddly, the things that really help don’t seem like they need to be expensive. All you need for an awesome flight is to be drunk, lying down, and watching a bad romantic comedy that is for some reason affecting you more than it should.

Booze and entertainment are free even in Economy, and I just don’t think people take up any more space when they’re lying down. You could have a double-bunk economy class that would be perfectly pleasant to sleep in, and if you staggered the bunks they could even sit up.

Which I guess is why they don’t do it. It’d be perfectly fine. There’d be no reason to pay two or three times a sane air fare to fly in comfort. The airline’s only economically viable option is to cause intentional discomfort to their poorest customers, and I’m not even sure it’s wrong. If they didn’t, base costs would rise and fewer people could afford to fly at all.

It’s a weird and slightly annoying piece of knowledge that’s going to make it even harder to enjoy the actually extremely nice World Traveller Plus class I’m booked on on the way back.

Next: the way back.

More Seat Quest 2010