I remember as a boy of six or seven, when my mom and dad and sister and I got a lift out to Malton (that’s the former name for Pearson International) Airport for a marathon flight to New York. I was almost jumping out of my skin, I was so excited. I think for a month afterward all I ever said in gatherings of more than two people was:
“You know what I did? I flew to New York on an airplane.”
As I recall, it was a four-engine Viscount operated by Trans Canada Airlines (predecessor to Air Canada). The flight probably took three hours, since there weren’t jet engines on a Viscount, but what were known as turboprops – internal combustion engines. I don’t think I bathed for a month; I didn’t want my skin to lose either that airplane upholstery or turboprop exhaust smell I’d spent three hours enjoying aboard the airplane. For me, that was when flying was an adventure. It was a thrill. Well, as I pointed out in a column a few months ago, when the airlines started charging for passengers’ check-on baggage, the thrill definitely disappeared.
First they took away the real cutlery and plates. Then, they took away the food. And last fall they took away having one’s suitcases put into the aircraft luggage compartment without paying extra. Then, last week, we learned that most of the airlines have admitted to reducing the width of passenger seats and amount of leg room so that they can cram a few more passengers on each flight. Customer service has become a race to the bottom, it seems.
But wait a minute. Before I descend into a very predictable rant retelling every horrible flying story you’ve ever heard, let me tell you about one of the most exhilarating passenger flights I’ve ever known (since the 1950s trip to New York on the Viscount, that is). It took place almost exactly 12 years ago. My wife and I had just completed a 10-day tour of Normandy; we were leading a group of about 50 people – including nine veterans and their spouses – to Juno Beach for the 60th anniversary observance of the D-Day landings, on June 6, 1944.
But it was mid-June now. Our tour was finished. Our entire group was now aboard the Air Canada jet about to depart for home. And I was just about to relax for the first time in a week, when the airplane PA system caught my ear.
“Would tour leader Ted Barris please identify himself to a flight attendant?”
My reflex reaction was that someone was missing or that someone was ill, or that maybe we were all on the wrong plane. I put my hand up and the chief steward approached. He told me quietly that there were a number of seats available in first class. And, with a twinkle in his eye, he asked if I knew of any travellers who might enjoy being upgraded. Did I? There were just enough first-class seats for all the vets in our group and their escorts.
“A few minutes later,” I remember David Boyd (son of one of the vets) saying, “We were out of those narrow-arsed seats in economy, and comfortably seated in plump, wide seats in first class being served glasses of champagne and orange juice.”
Periodically, during the flight carrying us back to Canada, I asked to check in on the vets. Each time I tripped into first class, the vets all raised their glasses in a toast, laughed like kids on a Ferris wheel and applauded Air Canada. In fact, when I got back to Toronto, I did just that. I wrote a long letter congratulating the flight attendants for their initiative, coming to me, and making our D-Day veterans feel like a million bucks.
There’s one other positive flight I’d like to share. I think it was back in the 1970s when I was often on flights between Toronto and Edmonton conducting business for the writers’ union I was representing. On one flight after takeoff, I remember leaning from my aisle seat toward the aisle seat immediately across from me. I struck up a conversation with the man seated there. As travellers inevitably do, we shared a couple of oddball trips we’d experienced on planes. But his story topped them all.
“I was a passenger on the famous Gimli glider flight,” he told me.
You may remember that’s the Air Canada jet that ran out of fuel half-way across the country and which the brilliant pilot in command that day (in 1983) landed safely by gliding to a perfect emergency landing on a sports car racetrack just outside Gimli, Manitoba.
And why, you might ask, was my flight with my aisle acquaintance so positive? Well, how likely was it that he’d be involved in yet another doomed flight? The way I look at it, anytime I can fly with assurance of a safe, uneventful arrival, these days, has to be a great flight.