We made it home from holiday, eventually, on the third day of trying. Not bad, really, by the standards of this hellish summer. Better than being stuck for 21 hours in traffic outside Dover with a screaming toddler in the back and no loo for miles. Or sitting on the asphalt for six hours in a heatwave without food or drink, as the inmates of one American Airlines flight to New York reportedly were this week. At least I wasn’t missing a wedding or a funeral, or even (like one despairing passenger on what was meant to be our flight home) trying and failing 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: delayed takeoffs, jumbo jets queueing on the tarmac unable to offload increasingly stressed passengers at the gates, a missed connection, a day and a night unexpectedly stuck at Newark airport. There’s only so much time you can kill boggling at the Donald Trump “I’ll be back!” T-shirts and Kamala Harris commemorative socks on sale in the airport gift shop.
Still, we managed to get on to another flight the next evening, which was airborne for one hopeful hour before starting to leak hydraulic fluid somewhere over Canada, prompting a scramble back to Newark and a runway lined with emergency vehicles. The rest, to be honest, is a blur. After more than 48 hours in transit everything takes on a faintly dreamlike quality, fogged by living on a diet of airline snacks and never being sure what time it is in real life.
Travel chaos is the ultimate in first-world problems, of course, confined to those lucky enough to afford a holiday. But if it’s a luxury complaint it’s also an illuminating one, a lens through which something may finally snap into focus. Going away in summer is the sort of thing most people take for granted. When even hopping on a Channel ferry becomes a heroic expedition against the odds, the sense of things falling apart at the seams is palpable.
The Home Office has been failing in plain sight for years now. But when more than half a million people are waiting to renew their passports, these failures become impossible to hide even from those who wouldn’t ordinarily notice. Nothing brings home the reality of Brexit, meanwhile, like gridlocked motorways in Kent. Now a summer of airmageddon threatens to expose some painful truths about post-pandemic working life, too.
The never knowingly understated Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary has blamed cancelled flights on a government that “couldn’t run a sweet shop”, together with airports failing to prepare for a predictable summer rush, which feels at least partly true. Ryanair was readier than some for the lifting of travel bans; the company retained its staff through lockdown (albeit while imposing an unpopular pay cut), and has been visibly exasperated with airports cancelling slots at the last minute, making it kick enraged passengers off otherwise viable flights. But this isn’t a universal story. We were told to arrive at Heathrow four hours before our flight, where we found the longest queues not at security but at woefully undermanned airline check-ins. Too many carriers who dumped their staff like hot potatoes during Covid seem surprised they haven’t come running back now it’s over. Why be loyal to bosses who showed no such care for you?
Worldwide, an estimated 400,000 aviation staff were fired, furloughed or warned they faced redundancy in the spring and summer of 2020. Many now show understandably little inclination to come back and bail out companies that made them feel disposable. Pilots who were leaving the RAF a few years ago for a seemingly cushier life flying civilian planes are now heading back in the opposite direction. Thanks to an unusually tight labour market, cabin crew are discovering they have options other than an industry notorious for cost-cutting (Lisa Nandy, the shadow levelling-up secretary, whose constituency includes workers at Manchester airport, says she has heard from crew taking Pot Noodles with them on stopovers because their company meal allowances no longer cover the cost of dinner when they land). Among those who did stay on board, resentment seems to be mounting. While we glumly watched the departure boards at Newark lighting up with cancellations, Lufthansa was scrapping hundreds of flights through Frankfurt and Munich after staff walked out. British Airways pilots are threatening to strike next, over pay and conditions.
Long before Covid-19 hit, the aviation industry had become a skin-of-the-teeth operation, operating on punishingly tight margins. At first airlines squared the circle of fierce consumer demand for cheap fares by charging for things that used to be free. Want to sit next to your own children, or take an actual suitcase with you? That’ll be extra. But lately things have taken a darker turn. 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 in the US for an investigation into the wider industry. If you can’t feel sorry for stranded holidaymakers, then spare a thought for short-staffed crews bearing the brunt of their anger, all while watching colleagues drop like flies in a new wave of Omicron. The captain of our aborted Newark flight was brought in off standby after the original pilot fell sick at the last minute, and when we finally took off again five hours late, it was only because the crew volunteered to extend their working day; board quickly, we were warned, or there won’t be a crew at all (there are legal limits on how long they can work without a break). Watching the exhausted-looking stewards rush through takeoff routines was the first time I’ve ever felt a twinge of nerves, rational or not, about flying.
Memories fade almost as fast as holiday tans, so perhaps by next summer we’ll have simply forgotten what this one was like. But not everything can be shaken out as easily as sand from a beach bag, and one lasting legacy of the last few years may be a new sense of fragility: the insecurity born of feeling that loyalty isn’t rewarded, jobs are not for life, things once taken for granted can no longer be guaranteed, and something somewhere may have been hollowed out beyond repair. Fasten your seatbelts: that means turbulence ahead.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
