Category Archives: Aviation

The Big Book of British Airports


It’s currently 23:00 on the nose, in whatever timezone EGLL is in and whatever its name is at the moment. I’ve been here for about two hours now, an hour of which was spent loitering in the baggage claims area waiting for my bag to show up (it didn’t). I couldn’t believe that, despite 3+ hour connection times in both Calgary and Toronto, Air Canada still managed some heretofore unknown level of incompetence by losing my bag. Except, not so much. As I was going through the process of filing the report (the “hey, jackasses” report, in the parlance of the trade), I noticed that my bag was lying off to the side, waiting for me. “Oh, it came in on an earlier flight,” the Guy Behind The Counter said. How I’m not sure. I thought one of the tenets of air travel security these days was that bags had to accompany passengers on their aircraft, though I suppose since I had no way of knowing whether the bag would or wouldn’t be on my particular plane the risk was lower than it would have otherwise been.

Heathrow is.. how to put this gently? Not nice. D. told me this earlier in the year and nothing she said could have prepared me for how truly ugly some parts of this airport are. I came into Terminal 3 and am now in Terminal 2 arrivals (thank you, late-night ACA arrival, and early-morning AZA departure, for making it impossible for me to sleep tonight!), and I passed through some seriously decrepit parts of the airport. It’s dingy. It’s dirty. People smoke. Everywhere. Even when they’re not supposed to. (About this, more later.) It’s maddening. But, I don’t have to spend a lot of time here, so that’s nice. Still, of the many airports I’ve been in, I definitely would but this one lower down on the list.

Except.. if you’re a plane nerd, this is heaven on earth. True, you won’t see a lot of variety in the types of aircraft, but the airlines! Oh my. Where else are you going to come face-to-face with a fabled Emirates 747-400 parked next to a Virgin Atlantic A340 (“4 engines 4 long haul”) next to a Royal Saudi 767 next to United next to.. maybe KJFK. I dunno. I’ve never been there. But the glimpses out the windows as I walked into the terminal were tantalizing!

I’m sending this on an Internet cafe-esque terminal in the T2 arrivals area. It’s being sent by e-mail because, for some inexplicable reason, it thinks that the LJ update form contains too many banned terms. I’ve never posted by e-mail before, so let’s hope this works.

And let’s hope I get some rest tonight, here on the ugly carpet of T2 Arrivals, because I’m going to be a damned zombie tomorrow if I don’t. Istanbul, here I come.

Morning glory

I woke up around 5:35 EDT somewhere over Lake Huron, after two hours of fitful sleep. It had been fitful, thanks to some loud girls two rows behind me, and because in spite of the added legroom and assroom, there’s something uncomfortable about the J seats on an Air Canada-configured A321 that makes sleeping difficult. The climate control system had run away on us overnight, leading to a moment where I woke up soaked with sweat, and another where I realized I was freezing cold. But it didn’t matter: 5:35, heading east-southeast over the Great Lakes, and the sun was coming up, peeking its way above the cloud deck hanging out around 20,000. It teased us for a while, the top of the disc popping up above the clouds as we traded altitude and angle and it rose in the sky. And then, as we left FL350, it finally rose, exploding in the cabin like a fireball, bathing everyone and everything in its brilliant red light.

Morning in the air — beautiful, even on two hours of (bad) sleep.

Climbout from Calgary was… interesting. I’d never before seen a thunderstorm from 9,000 feet, never mind been in one, and the lightning strobed all around us. Sitting on the ramp at CYYC, at the departure end of 34, I looked out the window at the city, lit in the glare of God’s own flashgun, a dozen within the space of about a minute. I wondered about the turbulance on climb, whether this would be the rollercoaster ride to end all rollercoaster rides, with thermal currents and microbursts and downdrafts and all the other meteorological phenomena hated by pilots… and it actually turned out to be pretty benign, much better than the WJA flight I took last month that was bumpy as all hell going into the same airport on final. A couple of ripples, a few nice thumps, but that was it. By the time we hit the flight levels, the storm was below and behind us.

The flight itself was OK. The service was suitably fawning and the food was surprisingly good, though I think whoever makes the menus at Air Canada should seriously reconsider putting noodles on a guy’s plate in mid-air. I’m not sure there’s an elegant way to eat fat noodles in an airplane, and it doesn’t help that my brain defaults to, “duh, slurp ’em,” which works in Shinjuku, but not in this part of the world. But whatever. I somehow managed to not make a mess, and figured out how my seat worked, and how to make the massage function work properly (result: about as well as any in-chair massage system you’ve ever used, meaning, of course, “not that well”). I think that’s about all that’s worth writing home about. The A321 is, of course, a hilariously uninspiring aircraft from a company with a hilariously uninspiring name that, in the process, manages to capture most of what’s wrong with commercial aviation today. Airbus?? Be serious. This is not a bus in the air, this is a damn airplane. Show a little respect for the thing. You don’t get to see sunrises over Lake Huron at 35,000 feet in a bus.