Qantas. Why do you insult us so?

Qantas is failing Adelaide?
Tourism Commission chief Andrew McEvoy is right. Good on him for sounding off.
It is time Qantas was held to account. But perhaps Mr McEvoy has not gone far enough.
Perhaps Qantas is failing Australia.
It is not just that it is not putting Adelaide on its flight paths. It is that the national carrier has turned into the worst of all aerial cattle trucks. It insults its passengers –we good people who pay its bills and keep it aloft.


It packs us in mercilessly with never a seat to spare – and, worse, with less leg room than one finds elsewhere. Mean, nasty skimpy 31inch seat pitch which means that the moment the person in front reclines, one is pinned in. Trapped. Don’t even think about crossing your knees.

It is a sickening irony that Qantas plays inflight DVT (deep vein thrombosis) exercise videos to passengers who can’t move a muscle. Unless they are in Business or First, of course.

Don’t believe what you hear projected by the marketing spin doctors and travel writers. They all travel Business. They have no idea what hell we real people go through. Of course the executives will be screaming with indignation and saying that I am absolutely wrong in my descriptions. But this is my opinion and not theirs. My experience and not theirs. I’ve done the hard yards - a decade of trans-Pacific flights in Qantas economy. I have watched conditions worsening year by year, fewer cabin crew working harder, tempers fraying. Less oxygen, too, perhaps. I always seem to get sick after one of these flights.

The other trick Qantas has learned is to deny its passengers choice in seat allocation.

There is a mystery to this procedure now. Apparently only uber-platinum frequent flyers can get a decent seat allocation.
The rest of us can consider ourselves lucky if we even get to sit with our travelling companions.

No blame to the staff, poor darlings. It is not their fault they deliver the bad news. And, however frustrated, we passengers must never take it out on them.

Nonetheless, I am regularly dumped at the very back of the plane by the check in staff. It does not matter how many months earlier I have booked or how early I arrive at the airport. The seating hell is the same. Hateful. I have ended up feeling very demoralised because over and over again, I have been denied the one simple request I make – a window seat, please.

What has happened to Qantas’s ability to perform civilized seat allocations? What has happened to our once-cherished, national pride airline?

This year I baulked and flew United where, at least, one has an option for Economy Plus seating which provides a dignity of leg room but, otherwise, conventional economy conditions. Yes, they actually let you choose seating when you book. And, that bit of extra leg room is all one wants on the long hauls. Ahh.

United, however, gives lots more. It is a very pleasant airline, albeit they tell me it has been in a financial crisis for years.


I used to be so proud of Qantas.
It was a symbol of my beloved country, my laid-back and friendly fellow countrymen, our high standards and good quality of life...
The flying kangaroo used to warm the old heart wherever one saw it.
Now, I apologise for Qantas to my international friends. How embarrassing.

Qantas has retained the best safety record, which remains a significant point of pride – but it has cheapened itself with the worst economy cabin conditions and ever-declining passenger service.

So I was not surprised, on an Internet airlines standards page, to read:
Qantas' A330s "make the live sheep boats to the Middle East look positively luxurious (the boats have more room, fewer travellers and more interesting conversation).”

It is downright sad - not just for the airline but for all Australians on whom it reflects.

Kafka's airport

Do not be tempted to change planes in Montreal en route to the USA. Who could have known that it would be such an exceptionally awful ordeal?

In blissful ignorance, we had accepted the Star Alliance option of flying Air Canada from Paris to Boston via Montreal. It was a bad start when Air Canada's Charles de Gaulle checkin desk insisted that, despite our long-standing booking and early arrival at the airport, we were destined to "the last seats on the plane" and hence, had to sit separately in central seats at the back of the plane. It was decidedly unimpressive, if not repulsive, to unfold my airline blanket after removing it from its plastic bag and find it absolutely covered in long blonde hairs. Such things seem par for the course these days. The cabin service was adequate and the seven-and-a-half-hour flight was pleasanty uneventful with good movies.

The big puzzle was when the stewards handed us all Canadian customs forms and said we had to fill them in - despite the fact that Canada was not our destination. There was considerable debate among incredulous passengers, but the air stewards just kept insisting, explaining that we had to collect our baggage on landing and go through Canadian customs. It seemed a bit odd.

But it came to pass. Of course, one of our bags was last off the carouselle, giving us some anxiety about our two hours of change-planes time. Little did we know that we would need every minute of it to stand about in slow cattle grid queues going through the most bizarre airport protocol in the world.

It turns out that Montreal takes transit passengers but does not have a transit area.

It is an airport designed by Franz Kafka!

The only way to get to the next plane is to go through all the formalities of entering Canada and then go through the formalities of leaving Canada and then go through the formalities of entering America. Hence we queued and queued in the cattle grids, firstly for Canadian Immigration stamps, then another queue for Customs. Then, lumbering along with our luggage, we had to follow signs around the airport to a Departure area where we had to queue at a checkin again, to show boarding passes, then fill in new Customs forms and join another cattle grid queue for US immigration and yet another cattle grid queue for customs before being able to part with the luggage and queue in another massive cattle grid for Security checking. By this time, we were not only cutting it fine to catch our plane, we were absolutely ga-ga with the infinity of zig-zag ropes and queues snaking to and fro across these endless hallways - and utterly mind-boggled that there was such a thing as a modern International Airport without a transit area.
If I was a gibbering cot case at the end of this absurd, impractical and insulting queue torture of officialdom, how on earth did old and frail people cope? Or mothers with bubs and toddlers?

Montreal, nice city that you are, you should be ashamed at this treatment of transit passengers. It is uncivilized and inhumane. Pure Kafka.

Ills of air travel

Air travel has now descended to a point where one can only say it has become a squalid experience.

I am old enough to remember when people dressed to travel. It was big deal - even in economy.

Now, one can't say that air travel is cheap. It is not. But it certainly is popular, despite the fact that it also is hell. Has become hell.
It has become an animal scrum.

I truly believe that most people are really nice - and interesting. But put them in the miserable airport holding pens waiting to get on planes and they are all the enemy. They sit about looking suspiciously at their fellow passengers, readying themselves for a ruthless ritual of queue-push and trample they to get to onto the plane. As if it's going to leave without them. When called in to board first (after the elite travellers, wheelchairs and babies), because you're one of the poor bloody sods allocated seats in the arse end of the plane, you suddenly find access to the departure gate blocked by a cram of scowling people. You have to squeeze between these sods with the better seats because they simply don't want to let you get on ahead of them. They want to be first on so they can hold up all progress down the plane by fussing around in the aisles while trying to jam ten tons of handluggage into the overhead lockers. The logic of loading the rear passengers first seems to strike some nerve of outrage in the modern traveller. So they push their way on among the tail-seaters and there they are, blocking the aisles in elaborate displays of aerial luggage juggling.

The airlines have their passengers where they want them - absolutely under their power. Well, let's not say the airlines as such. Whatever service or product one mentions these days is in busy answering to voracious shareholders and boards which forever seek higher and higher profits. There is no such thing as enough profit. Only "more". Hence, the interminable cut-backs and compromises.

I've become very sad and disillusioned by Qantas in recent years. A lifetime of passionate loyalty to the "national carrier" has been eroded into, well, straight-out aversion. I feel badly treated. Disrespected.
It is a very long time now since I had a civilized seat allocation from Qantas. It does not matter how early I book and pay - a year ahead! I am still victim to some perverse check-in seat allocation which will put me exactly where I hate to be, bumping around in the tail of the plane. Yes, I know it's the safest place. But it is not the most comfortable. I happen to hate it.
Yet, somehow, there is never any other seat to be had - even if I check in four hours ahead. Told that I can only get seat allocation at check-in, I al told at check-in that all the seats already have been allocated. Am I the only person who can only get seat-allocation at check-in. Qantas told me last time I inquired that I simply did not have enough Frequent Flyer points to merit a good seat allocation. I am only a Bronze flyer. Therefore worthless.
So, this time I chose Singapore Airlines.
Uh-oh. Arriving early at Adelaide airport to get seat allocations, where was I seated? Right at the back of the tail. Again!
And on the next leg to Frankfurt? Well, not quite in the back rows - but in the centre block of the tail section. This was another experience altogether - very odd. It seems the air stewards just can't see you there as they roam the aisles with their trays of drinks or snacks.

On both legs, the aircraft were filled to capacity. Indeed, I heard one check-in queuer in Adelaide mention that the airline had phoned to offer Business class seating if she would reschedule for the following day - the plane was overbooked.
Out of Singapore, Singapore Airlines turned into the Star Alliance flight which meant that it was also taking Lufthanser passengers and those of several other airlines. Needless to say, it was packed to the gunwhales, so to speak.
And there is the barrel over which the airlines have us. Volume is all. Sardine travelling at all costs, sorry, I mean profits.
So it comes to pass that the passengers are just a hapless form of product - willing to accept the myriad inadequacies, most of them with no idea that it was ever otherwise.

And, here comes the crunch, they travel packed in together against all rules of personal space, cheek to jowl with strangers in proximity they would tolerate in no other circumstance. They are fed a thin supply of oxygen to make them docile and drowsy. And, in sharing this meagre air, they share generously the myriad germs being introduced amongst them. Yes, I sat beside a sore-throat and coughing Malaysian accountant on the first leg and across the aisle from a French woman with an incessantly sneezing, nose-blowing streaming cold on the second leg. An ugh of ambient illness. And, that is not counting the chorus of sneezing, hooting and coughing from the rest of the section. Bugs and viruses from everywhere poured into an an aerial petrie dish.
I give myself three days before I find come down with my share of these illnesses. It is the dividend of every long-distance air trip.

Not only do we pay a lot of money to travel, it costs us.
Yes, a squalid business it is.
It is time for some organised air rage.