Plane weird: How the airport broke my spirit

I’m not a nervous flyer in the usual sense. Being in a tin can at an altitude of 35,000 feet (that’s half the height of Gary Barlow’s son, for reference) doesn’t really get me rattled. The rational side of me kicks in. You’re more likely to be hit by a car, or die from a coconut falling on your head, or catch some horrible flesh-eating tropical disease. Yeah, that feels better. But questing through an airport gives me a terminal sense of dread, a turbulent anxiety, a deep-seated terror.

I can never get the security scanner pose right, like a bad Hole in The Wall contestant. Last week, I found myself slumped on a departures chair in front of WHSmith’s where some lads set off a whole shelf of singing and dancing Christmas tree plushies.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I used to quite enjoy flying. I’d get excited about miniature plane food, buying a glossy mag and watching a trashy film on a tiny screen. As I got older, I was quite happy perusing Duty Free, dousing myself in enough sample perfume to last the entire trip, grabbing a cheap pint at the bar and sauntering onto the plane.

And it’s fair to say that airports and aeroplanes do still hold an air of mystery. Both are strange places caught between worlds; time and space are warped. It’s why you get that uncanny feeling when you walk through an airport, caught in a jumbo limbo. I read a lot of Mark Fisher, who bangs on about liminality, at the pub and I recently went down a rabbit hole reading his history of service stations. Which is to say, I’m into this kind of thing.

But now, there’s an air of misery, too, from working your way through departures to being spat out the other side at arrivals. No wonder Airline is enjoying a revival on X; the last couple of years have seen endless delays, lost luggage, major cock-ups and e-Gate-Gate. I nearly missed a flight last year when an airline worker, tape measure in hand, declared my bag was a centimetre too tall. 

“Air travel affects how people behave,” writes Robert Bor in his catchily-titled book Psychological Factors in Airline Passenger and Crew Behaviour: A Clinical Overview (not exactly an airport novel). “Some people regress to an infantile stage of development [or] confide the most personal and intimate details of their life to a complete stranger.” Travel stress, too much booze, claustrophobia, low air pressure, clashing personalities and anxiety equals cabin fever.

This has really taken off recently. In the last few months alone, there have been scandals involving vodka-charged violence (Manchester to Ibiza); excessively loud rapping (Liverpool to Amsterdam); pissing in the cabin (Derby to Tenerife), fighting over a MAGA cap (Heathrow to Texas) and a handjob under a coat (Tenerife to Bristol). I’ve swerved anything quite that bad, but a stag do behind me practising their best “BOSH!” nearly sent me over the edge earlier this year.

Everybody hates those people who blast TikTok videos on the bus, but it’s the same for planes; people watching entire movies on board without headphones is now very much A Thing. Maybe rawdogging a flight is for the best.

I’m not misty-eyed about the ‘Golden Age’ of travel, when flights looked like luxury hotels and Concorde gave us supersonic runway glamour. Nor am I a fancy high-flyer or business lounge lizard; economy works just fine for me. I’m not asking for much. But, you know, maybe free water and not having to sit in the tuck-jump position would be a bit nice? 

Perhaps, though, we can apply some blue-sky thinking and see the Herculean effort of catching a flight as something positive. Maybe one of those long-haul flights could be a greener train to the countryside instead. Because Euston’s a laugh, right?

• Kyle is a culture and fashion writer, and a man who has had enough of airports