United is a horrible airline. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The planes are old and threadbare, much like
the cabin crew. Seriously, United is the
B&Q of the airline industry. I have
never encountered anyone on deck who wasn’t at least 15 years older than me
(and I’m [cough] 43 this year); they are all extremely crabby, unless you
happen to be travelling with a wailing bairn, in which case they turn into
SuperNanny (but without the fetishistic upsides, unfortunately). I was unfortunate enough to be stuck on the
tarmac on a United 747 for 3 hours on my last trip to California a couple of
months back. From the moment we got on
board, it was sweltering and after some time the Captain comes over the tannoy
to tell us that there’s some kind of fault with the anchoring electrics, so
they can’t get any ‘air’ to us at present, but as soon as we push back,
everything will be ok. So we sit there.
And we sit there. A Middle-Eastern lady starts demanding she be re-seated, because we're in the rows next to the galley and it's somewhat enclosed, and she has Claustrophobia. The cabin-crew deal with this expertly by telling her she should have thought about her condition before buying a ticket and there are no other options for her except to get off the plane, and if she did that, United would probaly fine her for delaying the flight.
This seems to trigger the
petite, middle-aged lady in the window seat next to me to start practicing her
yoga; heels up on the headrest of the seat in front of her, crunching
forward. All very impressive, it takes
my mind off or our predicament.
Now I don’t know much about yoga, but I can see
she’s gone through the motions a couple of times before she gives up so I know
she’s beginning to feel as frustrated as me.
In fact, judging by the way she reacted to the actions of the cabin
crew, she was edging perilously close to Dhalsim territory:
We exchange pleasantries, and it’s at this point
that our 747-400 starts pushing back from the gates. Almost immediately, the
sound we hear is exactly this:
I swear I could feel the muffled thumps of Han
Solo banging the console up in the cockpit.
After a moment, the Captain comes back on the
tannoy and tells us: “So, folks, it looks like we have another electrical
failure. We're going to push back to the gate and then we're going to come up with something”. Oh great. Perhaps they haven't isloated the reverse power coupling? Maybe Artoo can do something with it... (yes, I know this was C3PO's line...)
We limp back to the gate and sit there for another
age; babies screaming, cabin crones cooing over them but neglecting the rest of
us. I turn to Dhalsim and offer my
opinion that our aircraft is, in fact, dead, (is no more, has ceased to be, is expired, etc. etc.). Moments later, the Captain is back
again, cheerily assuring us that everything is A-OK, Yes-siree. What a super
airplane we have under us, oh yes.
Ever-so-safe. Really very
safe. Oh yes. A very safe plane indeed. In fact, it was his
most favourite, safest plane in the whole United fleet. Mm-hmm.
This message he repeated every 15 minutes until everyone was choosing
which role from ‘Lost’ that they would be assuming the next time their feet
touched Mother Earth. I bagsied Sawyer.
So obviously, I was pleased for Captain Platitude. I mean, to me, the plane interior looked marginally
worse than the Clark’s Coaches that would take some of my best friends and most
hated classmates home after school in the 80s, but who am I to question the knowledge of a United Flight Captain? So I naturally fell under his
spell. That said, I first made sure I
first located the whereabouts of the alcohol, the medicine, the Air Marshal and
the Class A narcotics.
Sadly, all of this preparation was for naught as
we landed safely and soundly in San Francisco. Shame, as I was looking forward to finding and disappointing Freckles.
San Francisco, what an approach.
I just hope the passengers on Asiana Flight 214 did
not have the same cinematic experience as I did this time. An my A380, we had a camera in the tail
stabilizer which they switch on for landing (and take off, of course). When you
come into San Francisco, the approach is ridiculously low; you can almost smell
the salt and you’re almost on first name terms with the fish in the bay. Now on the ground, the A380 looks like a
bloated puffer-fish, but in the air it’s even worse. Coming into SFO with the memory of what
occurred a few weeks previously, you have the visible closeness to the water
from the side windows made worse by your knowledge that you’re the top deck of
a double decker aircraft, so the water is actually a damned sight closer than
it appears. Then you look at the monitor which shows the runway literally just
starting to become visible. It must be miles away still…
Forget the scant disregard for the 'no electronics during landing rule, and take a look at this. The whole video is pretty cool, but you start to get an idea of what I'm talking about at around the 14 minute mark (oh, and you get a quick flash of the view from the tail-fin camera too).
Ho Lee Fuk…
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