Another air-brained scheme

29 August 2008.

Amongst the hysteria surrounding the collapse of Zoom, another aviation story usurped the Zoom demise on my radar: Apparently an elderly woman followed her bag onto the check-in conveyor belt at an airport in Sweden.

A spokesperson for the baggage handling firm responsible stated “Luckily it wasn’t a long ride – only a couple of metres”. Well that’s ok then, if she’d travelled for half a mile on the conveyor belt now that would be serious. Don’t worry Mrs Spokesperson you can go back to your gold-coated ivory tower with its crystal chandeliers, diamond-encrusted Jacuzzi and emerald-covered toilet seats and brush this incident under the sixteenth-century Persian carpet.

This hideous incompetence barely gets noticed while the revealing that yet more former Eastenders with too little acting prowess to find other work are practicing their passa dobles for the latest series of Strictly Come Dancing gets front page billing.

More troublesome still is the terminology “ride” used, as if this elderly woman was seeking white-knuckle thrills from the latest addition to Alton Towers (possibly a new bus crash rollercoaster if recent events are anything to go by). Now this may have been the first time this woman laid down and felt the earth move for years, but I think the notion that this was not an unpleasant experience for her is about as believable as the smile you give a relative at Christmas after they’ve ignored your wish-list and bought something from Debenham’s that they’re sure is so far superior you’re miniscule brain couldn’t even comprehend to position it on the list in the first place.

Mind you, our senior Scandinavian presumably permeated passport control and conquered customs quicker than her fellow fliers. Certainly, this highlights some issues which could be addressed at airports by letting everyone go on the conveyor belt with their suitcase:

1. If both are on the conveyor belt together, the combined weight of traveller and baggage could be used when calculating fines for excess baggage. Surely everyone has now sat on a flight so squashed by the morbidly obese passenger next to them that they have considered jumping out of the nearest emergency exit. This would ensure these porkers have to purchase two seats and stop innocent holidaymakers being ripped off for taking presents home for their nearest and dearest.
2. There is no need to check-in three hours before departure because you can hitch a ride directly from check-in to the airplane. Planes are also, therefore, not left waiting to taxi for take-off because of some reprobate who overslept or couldn’t make sense of the signs directing them to the departure gate.
3. Nobody’s luggage is left behind only to finally arrive at their destination the day before they return. The owner witnesses it heading onto the plane so there is no need for a repeat of the scenes at Heathrow’s Terminal 5 in April with everyone not going to Milan’s luggage being sent to, yes, you guessed it, Milan to be sorted.
4. There is no waiting at the security gates for people to take off all their jewellery and footwear. Either you take it off early during transportation on the conveyor belt ready for the mid-travel scan or you set the alarm off, get pulled off as roughly as someone pulling off their suitcase at the arrival baggage claim not sure if it’s theirs or not, and miss the flight.

As for Zoom going bust it’s about as surprising as the finding of the latest pitiful study (see yesterday’s entry for four more) today entitled “Fly’s Brain Senses Swat Threat”. Did alarm bells not sound for the idiots purchasing tickets with Zoom when Oasis, famed for its £65 fares to Hong Kong, Silverjet and others went broke?

It costs about £65 to get from Gatwick to the nearest Chinese takeaway by car these days so why would a company requiring the endless gallons of aviation fuel to fly thousands of miles across the world be able to stay afloat. It’s about as likely as Russia not invading Ukraine and Moldova.

People need to realise that there is no such thing as a bargain in this world. The only thing you get for free in this life is the clap or a bunch of fives to the temple. For those that are struggling to understand this concept, if a DFS advert telling you its sofas now have 75% off, think about why that might be.

Companies are about as likely to do something out of the kindness of their heart as a heroin addict scrabbling around for their next fix. The very statement that they have a heart is more erroneous than the philosophy that opening up the hard shoulder to motorists will reduce traffic jams. The only motivation is maximisation of shareholder value. If it is perceived a consumer good is cheap, therefore, it is either damaged, out of fashion or season, the seller is about to hit the wall, or, most likely, was never its claimed 100% price in the first place. You get what you pay for.

And the fact that retailers can get away with charging that 99p should be investigated by the industry regulator, too, although the people that believe they’re picking up a good deal because the price is £499.99 rather than £500 and thereby are only paying for something beginning with a 4 rather than a 5 so they must be getting a good deal are really the type of individuals that society should not be permitting to have a bank account from the outset.

They're the same degenerates that expect their non-existent love lives to suddenly spark into life by logging on to Match.com because its latest television advertisement claims there are too many women on the site. Once they've wasted the majority of their benefits money on dating websites and on grounded Zoom aircraft, perhaps they can think about spurning the remainder on the latest flop-to-be that is Celebair - the latest gathering of Z-list reality TV rejects who, like the audience, are unable to find real employment. Perhaps Kenzie and Chico can form a duet to provide on-board entertainment while the Gate Gourmet meals are dispersed called It's ChicKen Time.

Apart from the most established – Ryanair and Easyjet in the airline industry – low-cost producers always hit the wall in harsh economic conditions. People need to realise that it is only because the going is good these companies are able to charge their apparently fantastic prices. If more people realised this the economic turmoil currently being experienced wouldn’t eventuate.

Just look at how the global economic downturn started – people being offered money by banks and credit card companies and accepting it more readily than a dog its kibble, perceiving it to be free and in infinite supply. Then when the banks call in the debts owed to them, people whinge as if they had a divine right to the money that came their way.

Those people need to ask themselves how they would react in a comparable scenario, i.e. if they were burgled, would they deem it unreasonable to expect the return of their money from the robber once caught?