On Flying

The Transport Industrial Complex

Let me begin by saying that I think aviation is a miracle. The means to circumvent the planet, making journeys which would have been possible by only a few once or twice a lifetime available to almost everyone (at least in the western world) is extraordinary. And the fact that tens of thousands of people a day cram into small metal containers and endure hours of confinement with discipline and good humour is testament to human cooperation and logistics.

I adore flying – once I'm in the air. The moment of take-off is an experience like no other: I try to feel the precise moment when the wheels leave the ground and my body moves from the element of earth to air. As the plane makes its first, rapid ascent, I stare out of the window at the toy houses, teeny-tiny cars trundling along the little roads and the endless greenness of the land I've just left. To say I have no fear of flying is an understatement.

But the best part comes once all sight of the earth has gone and we're in Cloud Land.The ground has been replaced by a surface of bright whiteness – it's so thick and even that I'm sure I could walk on it – and the blueness of the horizon goes into infinity. If I had a word for how it feels to be in this place, it would be 'upness'. It’s accompanied by a feeling of blissful calm. The stresses of the airport have gone and I'm not yet concerned about what I need to do when we land.

Before Times, something of this expansive feeling extended to the airport itself. The airport was the portal to this privileged experience, the place you started to slough off the banalities of home and prepare for a new adventure.

Then it all changed. My last Before Times flight was to Jordan in the year 2000. Usually the trip into the bright white uplands lasted only a short time before the plane enters a grey world or a space of high limbo with tracts of samey sea below. But on that flight, the whiteness went on and on and we flew into the sun for five hours. I vaguely considered asking the air hostess if I could go and visit the cockpit, but was reluctant to break the spell with human interaction. I wasn't alone in my experience: announcing that the plane was about to descend, the captain said that it had been 'a very special flight' for the pilots.

After 9/11, the custom of visiting the cockpit during a flight came to an end. The era of heightened airport security had begun: all bags had to be screened for explosives and carry-on luggage could not contain anything sharp. Then liquids and gels had to be under 100 ml and all fit into a small plastic bag. Passengers were obliged to remove jackets, belts, shoes; all electronics had to be scanned. Theses days you are expected to perform the tasks of unpacking and repacking, undressing and redressing quickly under the eyes of terse officials while moving through a crowd, bright lights and machinery. It doesn't feel great.

As this list shows, over the past twenty years, the security requirements have grown and grown.

A couple of vignettes from the first years of post 9/11 security, when we were all getting used to the new requirements, stand out in my mind. On the way to Beirut my nail scissors were confiscated. I mourned their loss briefly and was surprised when, seated on the plane, a rotund Lebanese flight attendant appeared, proffering them. 'Alexandra?' he asked, handing them to me. 'Don't tell anyone'.

Then there was the time a security official insisted on searching my rucksack after it had been through the scanner. He found nothing untoward inside, but completely missed the large pot of yoghurt I'd stuffed into an outside pocket that was right under his nose.

Amid a system that's become increasingly inhuman, I find these examples of kindness and human fallibility reassuring. Their counterpoint came when a security official at a Spanish airport took a jar of Seville marmalade out of my luggage and dropped it at height, in a display of malicious deliberateness, into the bin. (Someone who's worked in airport security tells me confiscated items are often shared out among the staff so perhaps it didn't go to waste.)

Around this time, I developed a specific kind of travel anxiety. Its focus is entirely on the airport and the stages one has to go through in order to get onto the plane. At the back of my mind lurks the fear that my way will be blocked for – irrational as anxiety generally is – no real reason. As in the plot of a Kafka novel, the fear is that my travel documents will be deemed inexplicably invalid and me, the passenger, persona non grata.

In reality, once I've cleared the hurdles and am sitting on the plane, my anxiety vanishes and I look forward to the flight.

For a long time I believed this strange anxiety was purely personal, likely to do with no longer being a gung-ho young traveller. But I now think it's a human response to a highly stressful situation. Kafka's plots use the absurd to convey some dark truths about modern life, bureaucracy and their effects on the 'natural' human. Airport security processes contain the classic elements of stress – a lot of external pressure and no agency. I think my antennae are picking up the message of the travel matrix quite accurately: the Security System Rules. In such an intransigent world, I don't feel quite safe.

Last time I took a flight both my anxiety and the levels of security had increased. At Gatwick, the security official insisted I remove the paper tissue I had up my sleeve so that it could go through the security scanner in its own plastic tray. In the face of my incredulity, he felt the need to justify the requirement: 'it could have something on it'. The look of anxious earnestness suggested he was convinced that my bit of toilet paper could be a terrorist threat.

I didn't argue. Like almost everyone going through the airport, I brushed off the incident in the interests of proceeding with my journey. But as I headed towards the departure gates a thought went through my head: this is a form of systematised mental illness.

On the return flight, a security official with a brutish manner swabbed both sides of my hands with a strip carrying some chemical substance. He then indicated that I should raise my top so that he could pass the swab over my (bare) midriff.

This was a time for a hard NO. I had to say it three times before the man gave up on getting access to my torso and settled for swobbing my trainers.

And I thought: humanity's losing the plot.

In western society, we've taken centuries to understand that invasiveness causes harm and that consent and respect for what psychologists call personal boundaries are important to feeling safe and respected. Why are we regressing?

It occurs to me that the airport is a microcosm of what's going on in the wider world.

A reason such as Safety, Health, Climate or Harm is reified so that it becomes all-consuming, justifying the abandonment of many of the values and practices we've carefully built up over the centuries. This is happening fast, without proper political scrutiny or public discussion. Once a new Reason has been decided on, a particular measure is never enough; the drive is always to impose MORE. The burden of the new rules invariably falls on ordinary people while tending to benefit the corporations and organisations involved.

How many billion plastic bottles of water have been sold over the last quarter-century because of the ban on liquids?

On that last flight, I was again looking out of the window. But this time I saw things in the sky I'd never seen before – a series of planes flying past fast, emitting the trails we now see all the time from the ground. Two of them were so close that the grey plume they emitted brushed the wing of my plane. After that, the cloudscape below acquired a browny-grey colour and the window was covered with crystalline flecks.

The next day I could not speak without coughing. The sore throat that accompanied it lasted several days.

A sunny day in my local park

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Transport is a necessary and potentially beautiful thing. But, like every other human system and culture, it's corruptible.

The importance of mobility to us makes it ripe for abuse. People tend to be willing to disregard the intrusions and indignities I've mentioned above because they understand that travel is inherently demanding; we give the authorities the benefit of the doubt. Transport involves costly infrastructure, equipment and land, a fact which means those who run it have money and power. Unless we resign ourselves to riding donkeys along dirt tracks, we can't get very far without them. If those in charge of transport choose to abuse that power, it's easy to treat large numbers of people as if they are livestock, herded and subject to all sorts of soul-destroying procedures.

As my love affair with flying seems to be coming to an end, I realise that it's following the same pattern as my feeling about train travel – and for the same, non-personal reasons.

I used to love travelling by train. Even as a passenger, travel by car involves a certain attentiveness to the road and the needs of the driver. By contrast, the train travel of Before Times provided a combination of movement and peace. I would sit watching the landscape unfurl past in a state of suspended relaxation. At some point, a ticket inspector would bumble along and remind me where I needed to change. And that was it.

But over the past thirty years, train travel in the UK has undergone a profound shift. There's much that could be said about the privatisation and fragmentation of the network and the fact it's now the most expensive rail service in Europe. (There's a qualified account of that here.) What I'm interested in is the experience of the passenger and the attitude of those running the transport system towards the travelling public.

Part of the shift came with the introduction of penalty fares. I remember when teams of enforcement officers started appearing on the train network. They had a very different demeanour from the rest of the staff – purposeful, predatory – and their presence charged the atmosphere with tension. The last time I took a train for any distance - to buy a car so I didn't have to take trains any more - my ticket was checked four times over the course of a two-hour journey, with the fourth official clearly excited by the prospect of catching fare evaders. Such a system has its seductions; it recruits natural believers who then go on to create and maintain an Us vs Them culture.

'Security' is the reason for the rise of the many public announcements on stations and trains. For years we were warned about 'suspicious packages' and told not to leave any luggage unattended. Then, in 2016, came 'See it Say it Sort it' – a communications campaign so annoying that the company which created it felt the need to create a new piece of comms to defend the irritating qualities of the original message.

The last time I travelled on the notoriously unreliable Great Western Railway, I counted announcements on six different topics over a half hour journey, ranging from warnings against fare evasion to detailed instructions about how to get on and off the train.

Passengers on the London Underground are now subject to adverts and admonishments about their general behaviour. Posters all over the network bid us to 'be kind', to wash our hands and 'be considerate to others'. TFL's sexual harassment campaign goes even further, inviting passengers to report anyone they think might be staring inappropriately at someone else to the authorities. My impression is that most Londoners screen all this stuff out. But to those unused to the New London, it can be infuriating: “Every day you have to trudge through the same Tube stop hearing the same endless intonations from the Tannoy system at the escalators,' writes James Jeffrey in The Critic: '“grip the handrail”, “watch your luggage”, “be careful with your skirt”, “hold on to your child” (what do they think you are going to do?! push them down…), and on it goes.'

Along with their explicit message, these communications let the travelling public know what the transport bosses think of us. In their eyes, we are as small children who struggle to move about in a sensible manner. We do not know how to treat each other and must be instructed in the common courtesies. We are sexually incontinent and need surveillance and threats to discourage us from grabbing our fellow travellers' private parts. And, while we may not be potential terrorists, the threat of Terror is all around, requiring our constant vigilance and suspicion.

Unfortunately, we're not done with this unfortunate trend. Just as 9/11 ushered in a new age of security, Covid is being used to facilitate the next big jump in the control of the travelling public. 'Digitalisation,' as the World Economic Forum has been saying since Covid, is central to the New World Order.

The EU is instituting a biometric system, requiring the taking of finger prints and the scanning of eyeballs – for non-EU citizens entering the Schengen Area – very personal data which will be kept on the system for three years. The Entry/Exit System has been delayed several times because some countries don't yet have the technology, but we shouldn't kid ourselves about how this ability to surveil and track us will be used once in place.

The new biometrics for travel is being developed alongside an initiative by the World Health Organisation to track people's movements - 'a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from on-going and future health threats, including pandemics.' and the EU's Digital Identity wallet. In the video promoting it, the young European citizen's day begins with a reminder from the government to book her appointment for 'mandatory vaccination'.

There'a always a choice. I was inspired to hear how journalist and activist Derek Broze and his group chose not to use the facial recognition gates on his way into the UK recently. They were detained and interrogated by the UK Border police but had no regrets.

Because of the travel anxiety, I'm not sure I can handle that level of stress, so I've made the decision not to travel to countries requiring biometrics for entry.

Never underestimate the power of No. Collecting an online purchase recently, I heard the shop assistant turn away the customer ahead for not having an order number. I didn't have one either – I don't use a smartphone – but when my turn came I looked her in the eye and said I'd thought Waitrose would be less bureaucratic than that. And suddenly it was: the staff found they could do an ID check with my driver’s license. 'It's always worth asking,' smiled one of them.

So much for the No – we’re going to need many of them in the next couple of years.

But briefly, let's have a think about a Yes.

At some point, I'm going to launch the New Earth Salon, an online forum for envisioning the kind of society we would actively like to create. (There's already a Twitter account which you can follow @NewEarthSalon)

In that spirit, I invite you to take part in a thought experiment and share any thoughts in the comments.

If the politics and economics of transport were out of the picture, what would travelling be like?

- what would the ideal travel experience be like?

- how could the current system incorporate some small steps towards creating more pleasant, human(e) journeys?