2017 World of Words Tour: #1 NZ BIZ FIZZ

Mar 2017 LOGS #1:

MR GRUMPY’S NZ BIZ FIZZ

Air New Zealand has created a cheeky corporate image for itself. Its recent TV campaign in Australia features a wise-cracking Goose praising the comfort of its long-haul aircraft, especially in Business Class where among other things you score a fluffy mattress - presumably stuffed with Goose feathers - for your International flight. It waddles up and down the aisles between the seats as if passengers won’t for a moment be disturbed by a talking goose spruiking the airline. Given the pristine whiteness of the fluffy mattress the Goose has been toilet-trained.

Will Aussies give  a Duck for a Goose?

The base and humorous tone of these ads was attractive to me – I’m Australian and therefore expected to be a low-level rebel who doesn’t care for management or authority of any kind. This is a most erroneous belief to hang on to at my age. Life has taught me I am not a rebel, I’m only grumpy. I get grumpy or ‘moodily cross’ as the thesaurus has it, when I realise I’ve been tripped up by my own gullibility once again. More of that in a moment.

In the last few years I’d flown in the wide-seated pointy-end only twice before my irrepressible love of luxury quickly brought me to accept Business Class as the normal way to fly. For decades I’d say “I can’t afford to pay Business Class fares but what would I rather do, go Economy Class or not go at all?”  With the justification of a martyr hauling a load of guilt in his cabin bag I suffered the pain and frustration of being a member of cattle class. Then I flew with Singapore Airlines Business, had my epiphany, and now keep my mouth shut except when I’m writing this blog.

Butt what?

At bottom, Business Class is not about the ‘Vibe’. It’s about the Seat. Without a well-designed seat, you got plenty o’nothin’ but hours of discomfort. I asked myself what happens to the thousands of plane seats that become superseded every year. This is the kind of speculation I indulge in when I run out of imagination after 10 hours in the air.

The internet tells me that when commercial aircraft reach the end of their working life they aren't just shuffled off to a retirement home in the Arizona desert or squeezed to death in giant industrial compactors. Aircraft recycling is the process of harvesting parts and materials from end-of-life aircraft, and there are specialist recyclers around the world that do nothing but buy and break up decommissioned aircraft, selling off components until all that remains is a bare carcass. This process is known as value extraction.  Only then do the remaining bits get transformed into bottle caps and souvenirs. If aircraft were Terminators, they would be supply enough bits of the T100 model to animate at least 15 sequels, with reconfigured bits of Schwarzenegger playing ever-diminishing roles.

The aviation industry has discovered the dollar value of recycling, and prioritises reusable items in the design of new aircraft. An older model Boeing 747 can be recycled up to 50%; and of an Airbus A320, only about 5 per cent of its components are left after dismantling finishes. Easily removed components such as galley carts, overhead bins and seats are the first to go. The fire retardant properties of aircraft seats breaks down after a while which renders them unsafe and illegal for further use in aircraft, so many end up on ebay and find retirement in an aficionado’s lounge room or man cave, although some are repurposed in more creative ways. Seats from superseded Finnair aircraft have ended up as passenger seating in Finnish Red Cross vehicles (I presume the drop-down oxygen-masks are included).

A 1988 Qantas first-class seat can be yours to keep. Photo: ebay

 You can pick up leather seats from the defunct Australian airline Ansett for AU$1000 (and it has the residual thrill of channeling the spirit of roughly 75,000 bums which have graced that cowskin before you). If this idea gets its hooks into you, why not buy an illuminating "fasten seatbelt" sign or a trio of economy class seats on the cheap?

Sit on it

Serious collectors will find other items from the aircraft recycling catalogue are far more expensive. A set of second-hand landing gear for a Boeing 747 will set you back around $US300,000. A modern jet engine in good condition with full documentation is worth millions to the right buyer. Some are rented out with an asking price of around $US20,000 per month. More likely however, such big ticket items are worth even more broken up and sold as parts to satisfy constant industry demand for components. In some cases an individual component might see service in multiple aircraft before it reaches the end of its working life. 

 Auckland check-in feels like this, only purpler.

This kind of day-dreaming does not prepare me for Air New Zealand’s Business Class check-in lounge at Auckland Airport. Its design is less ‘the shock of the new’ but more of the ‘the tasteless, updated’. It looks and feels like a set designer’s parody from the first episode of Star Trek seen in 1966. Individual passengers are ushered into a large purple-and-white room where softly-spoken attendants borrowed from 2001: A Space Odyssey process you and wave your bags away as if they are spare corpses at a funeral home. The walls feature panels of glass framed at illogical angles and in unrelated pastel shades last seen in the 1955 Laminex catalogue. Your bags undergo  unspeakable Customs rituals behind an opaque glass wall while you are beamed politely towards your aircraft.

When I travel these days I don’t expect a sci-fi adventure or the rigours of pioneering. I don’t expect physical and mental challenges or a sense of achievement. I don’t expect to be stuck in the ice or be stranded at twenty thousand feet without oxygen or face a herd of stampeding Wildebeests. When I fly Business class I do expect to be made physically comfortable, and that includes good quality food and considerate, proactive service during flight.

Perhaps I’ll never learn, because I accepted what the Airline told me: after the Sydney-Auckland-Buenos Aires will deliver a transcendent life-changing experience during the 12 hours between airports. My every need, and especially my need for luxurious comfort will be orgasmically satisfied. At the gate lounge I avert my eyes from the queue of po-faced passengers at the Economy desk. As a Business Class passenger you are expected to ignore the hostility radiating from the back end of the plane.

                           ‘The Slot’ (photo by Air NZ)

                          The shape of the seat space is                                         tailored to non-terrestrial passengers.

I am shown to my seat. Wait - is this a seat? It’s more of a padded open-ended coffin-shaped slot set at 60 degrees from the long axis of the plane. My back faces the window. All the seats deny their occupiers a view. You have to be pretty blasé to not want to see out the window! At the aisle end of your slot is a padded tractor seat to put your feet under and to get in your way when you stand up. As the flippant ‘video tour of your seat’ shows, you can put the hard word on pretty blonde passengers and invite them to sit on the tractor seat and spend time with you.

On the walls of your slot, illuminated buttons control various actions of your seat. They have unintelligible icons on them to tell you what they are. Other important features, like the plugholes for your headphones, are not illuminated or signed at all. To ask help from a attendant to find such a basic thing as a headphone hole is humiliating and means that they have control over you, not the other way round. And when I do connect the ‘phones and start a movie, it is interrupted on a random but regular basis for ‘important announcements’ that all travellers know by heart…but the sound quality is excellent.

At our first stop, New Zealand Immigration and Customs re-check my bags, my shoes and my toiletries for germ warfare weapons and communicable diseases. An hour out of Auckland, my Seat Slot has given up several more of its secrets. By experience I learn that the TV screen swings out of the slot wall and cleans everything off your tray table…unless you swing it 180 degrees against the wall and then pull your table up and out.

Time for bed. The attendant stops me trying any other buttons by smiling pityingly and fussing over the mattress hidden behind the seat. My fellow passengers wear bemused expressions like mine. The good news is the sleeping pad is actually comfortable. Perhaps they pulled all the feathers out of their pet Goose’s ass and put them in the mattress. The two pillows are just right, soft but plump. I can’t feel any seat grooves under me. I try to stretch out, and it’s not too bad. I’m 6’2” and must bend at the ankles, knees and hips to fit the slot but it’s relatively comfortable.

The slot is not like your own little private room, as they suggest, but a narrow gutter that you must fit into. You have no window, remember, so all you see is your TV screen, the reading material you have chosen, or a view of several pairs of feet sticking from the ends of the slots facing you. The ‘amenities pack’ they give to us privileged passengers contains a pair of cabin socks in a startling burgundy-and-grey harlequin pattern and may well be part of the sense of fun the airline is touting but which are as humiliating as the headphone plug-holes. There is an old joke about New Zealand women who wear socks with their thongs, and I suspect these are the socks.

Food? Wine? Acceptable but forgettable, nothing noteworthy. The wine list is limited and predictable. No serious complaints, only a shrug.

At the eleventh hour (traditionally the last opportunity to bare your soul or make a will) I realise I have slept for an hour or three. Up to that point I reckoned I’d never slept more than an hour in any plane seat in any Airline. Air New Zealand had achieved what I believed impossible: created an environment in which I could sleep. Once I am able to return to my normal spinal shape – more or less a straight line instead of the pod-induced “S”, I am grateful. I totter over to a window and look out into a world I hadn’t seen during my flight. I can walk again and am ready for some sympathetic nursing from the smiling attendant, who clearly has ‘caring training’.

The Drum

Air New Zealand’s Business Class is a quality product, although some details have been overlooked and they didn’t take the opportunity to win my repeat business very seriously. Despite the barely human environment in the ‘Slot’, I was able to sleep. I give Air New Zealand serious points for this, with a proviso: calling you by your first name is nice recognition, yet an emphasis on consistent excellence would mean more to me than consistent ‘personality’. On a long flight the jokey banter wears thin, especially as you are expected to join in for the entire flight. The airline would have done better to help me drop off to sleep by leaving me enough alone-time to get my bodily systems to shut down.

And I’d sure like to plant one of my Nikes up that Goose’s posterior orifice.