Stuart Wolfendale

It is very hard to think of any other product that can alter itself half way through its operational life, for the worst, before your very eyes and , should you ask the purveyor why this has happened, he’d tell you that it was unavoidable, operational, happened all the time and you must be new to travel, sonny.This This possibly unique item is in fact a return airline flight. The facilities on the flight back can sometimes bear no resemblance to those provided on the flight out. When this involves a marked improvement in conditions for the home run, the traveler is pleased and thinks in terms of add-on benefit, forgetting to consider his outbound journey as comfort subtracted. When it happens the other way round as it did for me on Dragonair flight number 909 from Beijing last Wednesday, the comparison goes straight into minus figures from the moment you stand over your seat. I saw this one was not the one I came up in.There were a lot of other features missing from the flight I had flown up on. Thinking in terms of accessories that had been a Naomi Campbell. This one was Angela Merkel.The difference was aggravated because I was traveling in business class and the outward flight was fitted out with those much vaunted seats that are supposed to massage your kidneys, if need be to the point of failure. They have sliding up and down headrests which you stand up and shake like an annoying baby to adjust. They are also ‘designed’ for sleek interstellar voyagers and are therefore smaller than the old business seats which looked a bit like chairs out of my Auntie Dorothy’s three piece lounge suite, built for fat uncles.As you can see, I am not fond the new seat which doesn’t get far down my thighs. I actually prefer the old one which I was looking at on the return flight. That’s not the point though when the customer has been started off on the new stuff and he is paying over HK$7000 for it –there and back.The facility slide steepened. The old chairs did not have audio video screens dug into their arms. On the way up there had been more screens in that cabin than a Fortress store. A range of about forty channels serviced that twitchy irresolution that comes upon the mind 30,000 feet up. Going back, there was one screen, the size of a small tea tray,  stuck on the wall. There was one movie to be watched on it.I know that in flight movies must neither alarm nor slander nor cause pause for thought but did it have to add intellectual insult to commercial injury by being a “Rockie” film? Out of the 20 audio channels, nineteen of which were pop and rock in four languages, I hid in the undulating sugar of Thai pop.It was probably a unhappy coincidence that, compared to the meal on the up journey, the lunch was tripe. I mean that metaphorically because if they had served tripe literally it would have had to be an improvement. I turned to my colleague with an arched eyebrow which was all that was needed. “A distinctly economy class experience.” was his reply.I did not confront the cabin staff with this ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ trick with the aircraft. There was nothing they could do all the way up there on a Wednesday afternoon. They might have tagged me as a complainer and put laxative in my Aspi Spumante. I’ve been reading “Air Babylon” you see.That was unlikely. They were an exquisitely courteous crew and if they were conscious of flying in an aircraft fitted out in the time of the ‘Spruce Goose’, they weren’t showing it. If I asked management, they would roll their eyes and tell me that of course you can’t refit a whole fleet all at once.Well now I’m rolling mine and saying, “I know that, silly, but in the interim why don’t you give those people who get to fly in a plane with  canvas seats watching ‘Gone With the Wind” on a reel-to-reel projector a discount? I think 25% of the $7000 back  for compulsory ‘Rockie”, durian pop on the ‘cans’ and pork in slurry for lunch would not be unreasonable.   

  

 

 

 

 

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