Jamie sent us this…
Having been flying back and forth to Europe several times a year for many years, I have experienced several European airlines, BA being the latest. The multinational cabin crew, while attentive is still multinational (mostly Brazilian, probably cheaper). Regret to say that BA has lost the kind of “British” service one had come to expect. Air France goes out of their way to make sure their customers feel they are in France at 30,000ft as do Iberia and Lufthansa in varying degrees. In any event, BA’s fares are currently not competitive in the face of their rivals on the same routes. A great shame.
Charles Jordan, Buenos Aires, Argentina
Yeah, more national stereotyping on our British Airways flights, please. How about some rigid, posture-correcting seats for starters, and complementary bottles of upper-lip-stiffener handed out after take-off? The captain’s announcements could be heralded by bursts of Elgar. Laura Ashley decor. Window shutters replaced by nets. Maybe they could replace the Brazilians with a surly, disinterested – but above all, WHITE BRITISH – cabin crew that begrudgingly responds to calls for assistance ten minutes after they’ve been made. Drinks could be accompanied by endless free shots that taste like cough medicine, until we’re fighting in the aisles and waving our cocks about, shouting, “wwwwaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy!” while other passengers in bowler hats or twinset and pearls or both look on discreetly over the tops of their middle-class tabloids and tut disapprovingly. For entertainment, 10-year-old boys could be paraded up and down the plane to be spat, sworn and swung at, then locked in the hold until they’re 18, whereupon they’re released anonymously into a humming fart-cloud of hatred and speculation. All this in a pressurized atmosphere of simmering racial tension and repressed sexuality.
48 Responses to “France At 30,000ft”
Tell me more about this upper-lip-stiffener. How versatile is it? Is this what Pelé is now peddling to people in Buenos Aires to address dysfunctional male genitalia?
You mean uninterested, not disinterested.
So on the plus side at least you’re getting to see their muffs, eh Charles?
‘In France at 30,000ft’ – surely a shoe in for the title of monsieur C Brant’s next literary offering.
Charles Jordan has clearly never flown EasyJet. He’d begging never to have an British cabin crew again otherwise.
Who cares?
Christ, you just made me almost weep for that sceptred isle. I’ve never felt so homesick. God save the fuckin queen, innit.
I really can’t get my head around these neanderthal, arse scraping, opinion-holders. First they complain that Britain is a horrible place, degraded of all that made it Great 100 years ago (I’m assuming of course that Charles Jordan is an ex-pat or at least a person with some kind of morbid fascination with Great Britain), but then they demand that they have Britain 30,000 ft in the air… or wherever they go.
Can we please clarify what these fuckwits actually want?
upper-lip-stiffener is a bit like botox, except it actually kills muscle tissue
I flew with Lufthansa once. Didn’t feel like France much. Or Germany for that matter
I flew BMI Baby recently, and it did feel like a Birmingham Crèche.
Mainly because there were idiots like Charles Jordan having tantrums in the aisle about all the furriners on board.
I flew Emirates last year, and was sorely disppointed that it wasn’t Dubai 30,000 feet in the air. I was looking forward to coming across rich Arabs, drunken Western expats, South Asian migrant workers treated like slaves, and abandoned white elephant projects.
Maybe there’ll be enough room in the Airbus A380 for those…
Clearly neither the uninterested nor the disinterested.
I flew X once and racial stereotype Y emerged. It was typical.
Do Air France let you be in Paris at 30,000 feet or would that contravene decency/aviation laws?
I haven’t got a cock to wave about in the aisles, can I wave one for somebody else’s?
Oh fuck it, one day I will read what I type before I hit submit!
I once flew Air Canada, they made me feel like I was in Victoria & Alberta, two birds, one stone & all that….
I’ve not been to Ireland, but I hope it isn’t crammed full of yellow and blue plastic seats, though a 2p hotel room would be a nice suprise.
What does it feel like to be in France? I suspect that for most HYSers it would amount to endless bureaucracy, smelly cheese, surly garçons and an instinctive distrust of foreign goods, not to mention a stubborn refusal to understand perfectly good Ingerlish. Are these qualities that passengers should look for on Iberia or Lufthansa?
I flew to That America with United a couple of years ago and the experience of being hit in the shoulder with a trolley every twenty minutes made it feel exactly like Britain. Something is wrong with this picture.
Personally, I don’t like shots that taste like cough medicine, but I do like cough medicine, particularly Benylin. But not that non-drowsy rubbish.
And does it only work on lips?
I’m flying with Malev to Budapest in the morning – I don’t really care whether it ‘feels’ like Hungary, I just want it to land safely at the other end…
I’m glad BA are tying to price dickheads like this off their planes. Sitting there, humming ‘Rule Britannia’, saluting the Captain at the departure announcement and gaffawing relentlessly at Only Fools all flight. “He fell through the bar!! Fnar fnar! It’s the wrong chandelier!! Dribble.”
He means it doesn’t feel like the 30s, when the empire was clinging on and the fuzzy-wuzzies knew their place.
If he really wants to feel like he’s in Britain why not wait to just get off the fucking plane when you land? Shitsticks. Either that or we dump him in the middle of Brixton wearing a bowler hat and a monocle and send him off to find some Earl Grey.
As a small but connected aside, I watched the clip from Hale and Pace called Yorkshire Airlines on Youtube the other day. They said “Ay up!” to everyone as they boarded and there were indeed nets at the windows of the plane.
Is there a cognitive dissonance alert that should be going up here? Aren’t the ideas of a state-owned flag-flying airline a little opposed to prevailing right-wing free-market and anti-government-intervention views? Or is it just that these people wish the crews on the planes weren’t allowed to form unions, strike, gather in groups of three or more, be foreign, not be Liz Hurley from Passenger 57, be brown or not know all the words to ‘God Save the Queen’?
He does have a point though. I flew Air France recently and it did feel like Paris at 30,000 feet. There was dog crap everywhere, the staff were rude, a race riot broke out and my fellow passengers engaged in a full-on swingers party.
Luckily I sneaked through customs a 500 ml bottle of lip stiffener and sat there stoically reading the Daily Telegraph, mentally composing a letter to the editor about the decay of French moral standards.
From the Catholic Paedos thread:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/haveyoursay/2010/03/can_catholic_church_overcome_c.html
Bloody ‘ell – comment number 1 removed. Did anyone catch what he put? Was it simply “First” ?
And probably MULTILINGUAL, numbnuts. If he’s been living in Argentina for many years, he really ought to have noticed by now that most of the people there speak Daygo lingo and probably quite appreciate aeroplane staff who also speak Daygo lingo (or Daygaõ lingo in the case of the Brazilians). It’s the same on most airlines on most long-haul routes.
Or perhaps he wants the British flavour to extend to the cabin crew shouting “Senior! Oona thervayzza pour too? Veeno blanko? Veeno rossy? El scotcho?” etc.
@Rod
Very good point.
Reading between the lines I’m pretty sure that this means by the time the plane reaches 30,000ft, the crew have had a guts full of Charlie and kick the fucker out.
Though maybe slow shouty English as a concession to furrinspeak is what he finds so familiar and reassuring.
Oh no, I didn’t make a good point, did I? I apologise to everyone and I shall have my man bring me my Chesterfield at once.
I’m mostly worried about the varying degrees, myself. I think we need some form of EU standard on this. We can’t have airlines randomly selecting the level to which they fulfil national stereotypes. It’s big business ignoring the needs of the little man yet again, specifically the terminally bewildered little man who needs it making clear to him where he’s flying to. Who do they think pays their wages, eh? EH????
Sorry, I think I need to go and lie down in a darkened room. It’s been a difficult morning.
Sounds fantastic! Sign me up!!!
Maybe Nelson could check with his colleagues at the Beeb for us?
@Loumo
I saw what you did there. You said
I think that’s quite clever, ‘cos I went to the wrong terminal at Heathrow once, and was bewildered.
Nelson is being defamed on the Sun website.
not only are people pretending to know about Millgram’s experiments in the 1960s but they are also taking Nelson’s name in vain. The TV show in question went one further and:
“Contestants were told to zap their victim actually an actor with 460 volts of electricity when they got questions wrong while a studio audience chanted ‘punishment’The actor screamed and writhed in pain begging to be let go before falling silent and pretending to die.”
Read more: http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2896027/Torture-game-show-slammed.html#comment-rig#ixzz0iXntZgNM
The fantastic comment that follows is:
You couldn’t make it up.
iylismwdyglt IRL? http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/mar/18/turkey-threatens-expel-armenians-genocide
@ pigfrottage
The article doesn’t say who is outraged at the TV show. Personally I’m outraged at the human race, 19% of the population are obviously lefty liberal tree hugging sandal wearers who need to do what they are bloody told!
@random punter
Blimey, that one wasn’t even deliberate. Clearly my subconscious is more intelligent, witty, and attractive than my conscious. This must be why I’m at my best when drunk.
Confidential internal memo: British Airways
In view of the recession, we must find ways to maximise efficiency by recruiting staff from the cheaper nationalites. Please find below a list that should help when considering applicants:
Cheap
Chileans- cheaper than Brazilians? please research
Brazilians- 2 for 1 at Aldi
Blue blooded English types: Meets Nat Min Wage, New Deal applicants accepted
Expensive
Number four in a series on “How to get into the EU”.
He should try flying Air Wales. Gaurenteed
leek soup, and close harmony singing on every flight (excepting French airspacew here it is a requirment of entry that cabin crew don striped t-shirts and berets and serve onion soup from bicycles).
Can anyone explain what’s quintessentially German about a cheese roll?
Because whatever time of day I fly with Lufthansa, they seem delighted to announce a “meal” consisting of a cheese roll. And a very small cup of moderately bad coffee, if I’m lucky.
It’s not the badness – I expect bad from airline food. It’s the lack of creativity in their exclusively cheese-roll-based menu. Sometimes the most fun to be had on a plane is trying to work out what exactly the steaming lumps or luke-warm slab of pink sat mournfully in your plastic tray actually are…
Oh no, Charles. Don’t fucking tell me it was fucking multinational? Shit?! Shiiit!
But he’s right. I mean, you feel the same don’t you? He… just… doesn’t care that the crew is actually good at its job, he only cares that the good, efficient crew isn’t BRITISH.
We’ve all been there, one way or another. We were 14 years old, some of us drunk, many others stoned, etc. Just happens.
Alright, now pass me my coat.
I flew KLM several times and was relieved that we weren’t below sea level at 30,000 feet