It was home on the third day of trying. It's not bad by the standards of this summer. It was worse than being stuck in traffic for 21 hours with a toddler in the back and no bathroom. The inmates of an American Airlines flight to New York were sitting on the tarmac for six hours without food or drink in the middle of a heat wave. I wasn't missing a wedding or a funeral, I was trying to get back for a sister's graduation.
All we had to contend with was a flurry of last-minute changes to our tickets, followed by someone else's plane breaking down on a runway in New Jersey and triggering a now woefully familiar chain reaction. You can only kill so much at Donald Trump. There are t-shirts and socks for sale in the airport.
We were able to get on to another flight the next night, but we had to return to Newark due to a leak of fluid over Canada. It is a blur. After more than 48 hours in transit, everything takes on a faintly dreamy quality, fogged by living on a diet of airline snacks and not knowing what time it is in real life.
Travel chaos is the worst first-world problem because it is limited to those who can afford a holiday. It is an illuminating complaint, a lens through which something may finally snap into focus. Most people don't think about going away in the summer. The sense of things falling apart at the seams is felt when hopping on a Channel ferry.
The Home Office has failed in plain view for a long time. When more than half a million people are waiting to get their passports renewed, these failures are impossible to hide. The motorway in Kent is like nothing else in the world. Summer airmageddon could expose some painful truths about post-pandemic working life.
A government that couldn't run a sweet shop and airports that didn't prepare for a summer rush were blamed for the cancellation of flights by the boss of the budget airline. Even though it imposed an unpopular pay cut, the company retained its staff and was not happy with airports canceling flights at the last moment. This isn't a universally told story. Four hours before our flight, we were told to arrive at Heathrow, where we found the longest check-in lines not at security but at woefully undermanned airlines. Many carriers who dumped their staff seem surprised they haven't come back yet. Why be loyal to people who don't care about you?
In the spring and summer of 2020, an estimated 400,000 aviation staff around the world were fired or warned they were going to lose their jobs. Many people don't want to bail out companies that make them feel disposable. The pilots who left the Royal Air Force a few years ago to fly civilian planes are now back in the same place. Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, whose constituency includes workers at Manchester airport, says she has heard from crew that take Pot Noodles with them on stopovers because of the tight labour market. Some people who stayed on board seem to be feeling resentful. We were sad to see the departure boards at Newark light up with canceled flights, but we were also happy to see the flights being scrapped in Germany. The British Airways pilots are threatening to go on strike.
The aviation industry was skin-of-the-teeth before Covid-19 hit. Airlines began to charge for things that used to be free because of fierce consumer demand. Do you want to sit next to your own children or carry a suitcase? It will be more. Things have taken a turn for the worse recently. The American Airlines pilots union recently accused companies of trying to fly more airplanes than they can actually fly and building these schedules to an inhumane level, prompting calls for an investigation into the broader industry. Short-staffed crews are bearing the brunt of their anger and should be spared a thought if you can't empathise with them. It was only because the crew volunteered to extend their working day that we were able to take off again five hours later. I have never felt a twinge of nerves about flying, but watching the exhausted-looking stewards rush through takeoffs was the first time.
By next summer we might have forgotten what this one was like because memories fade so fast. One lasting legacy of the last few years may be a new sense of vulnerability: the feeling that loyalty isn't rewarded, jobs are not for life, and things once taken for granted can no longer be taken for granted. Fasten your seatbelts, that will cause turbulence.
Gaby has a column for the Guardian.
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