Terry Jones

When landing in an airplane, the stewards go around and ask that people raise the pull-down covers on their windows. Why is that? How can it be so important that one can see out (in?) the windows during landing?

After landing, some airlines (in some cities) tell you to keep your mobile phone switched off until you’re inside the terminal building. On Easyjet they used to say something about it being dangerous because the plane was refueling. Uh, right.

Some of the newest planes have a camera mounted in the tail fin and the live video is shown in the cabin. It’s absolutely great, and passengers are spellbound. But, when you come in to land they turn it off! You can hear the groan go round the cabin. Why shut it off at the most interesting moment? Do passengers throw up or something? I always feel cheated.

Why, when standing waiting for bags to appear on the baggage belt, does everyone have to push to the front? It completely obscures the view for the 75% of people who are not at the front. We all learned in kindergarten to “take two steps backwards so everyone can see” etc. Makes so much sense in this context – you could all see, you could step calmly forward to take your bag when it showed, etc. But no. If you do leave a space, someone will just come and stand in it.

The Germans on my Air Berlin flights were just too calm. On landing, after taxiing to the gate and stopping, the vast majority of them didn’t bounce to their feet to start madly scrabbling for their bags. They just sat there. The aisle was only half full. Seated in a window seat, I nearly had a panic attack at the wasted opportunity to push ahead of a couple of people.

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