If they can get the multi-million dollar Hollywood-style TV treatment with a series starring Christina Ricci, mocked up airline fuselages, corseted-stewardesses and all that faux fifties/sixties fashion glamour, plus a hagiographic documentary narrated by aging former Bond girl Honor Blackman, they can feel the Wrath of Toad.
It’s not a general rant because airlines have my sympathy. It’s a swine of a trade to be in and just being safe, on time and courteous will not save you if there’s too much red ink on the balance sheet.
And over the years I’ve flown with TWA, Dan Air, British Caledonian, Laker, British Eagle, Braniff, Air Florida – and a host of other airlines now gone to that great-sky-above-the- bit-of-sky-they-used-to-fly-in, so I’m not blaming them just for going out of business.
But to see them now mythologised as the three-Martini dream of the age when flying was supposedly at its zenith and the staff fawned and simpered over the passengers, makes my gorge rise. They should have called the documentary Come Lie With Me, not Fly With Me.
Most of my experiences of Pan-Am were bad ones, and I flew them first in the very early Seventies when it was still relatively rare for the average person to cross the Atlantic.
So may I proudly present a Toad Pictures Production: Pan-Am: An Everyday Horror Story of Rudeness and Inefficiency.
Fade in: Scene one: I’m flying back from New York on a Pan-Am jet clipper in 1978. It was one of those shortened 747s, remember those? They were like long limos with the long bit taken out, and for Jumbo aficionados it was disorientating. I got up after a nap and walked forward to go to the lavatory. Suddenly a Pan-Am stewardess resembling Rosa Kleb rather than Christina Ricci stepped forward, jabbed me in the chest with her finger – no, seriously – long-sharp- nailed finger in the chest, and barked, “You – thataway.”
Scene Two: A quarter-full Pan-Am 747 flight Tokyo-Hong Kong-Singapore, leaves Kaitak four and a half hours late. After the safety briefing the flight attendants vanish.
This was the Marie Celeste of planes, not a crew member in sight. Galleys empty. Then I spotted a flight attendant coming out of the crew sleeping area. She tried to elude me but I caught up with her and begged for something to eat and drink.
When I refused to be dismissed she looked both ways, like she was about to sell me heroin, and hissed, “Come with me.” In the darkened galley she slid open a drawer, handed me a ham roll and a biscuit, stuffed two miniatures of red wine into my pocket and whispered, “Don’t let the other passengers see you’ve got food.”
Scene Three: LAX 1988. I’m with my business travel agent girlfriend who was then selling about £75,000 worth of Pan-Am tickets – a week! As a reward she’d got some Super Platinum Pam-Am Elite Seller card, and two free tickets to Los Angeles.
We checked in our luggage for the flight back to Heathrow, and told we might get an upgrade and thus to pick up our boarding cards at the gate. Big fat lie! At the gate they told us, “The plane’s full.” We spluttered with outrage that our baggage was already loaded. “Pick it up in left-luggage at Heathrow in four days or it will be destroyed.”
Lisa produced her trump card, the Pan- Am Thanks-For-Selling-a-Big-Bundle-of-Our Tickets bit of platinum. Gate girl shrugged, “Means nothing.” And it didn’t.We then had to pay for an airport hotel and two fresh tickets
back to London.
Those Pan-Am freebee reward incentive tickets cost us about £1,200 in twenty three years ago money. We came back Northwest to Gatwick via Minneapolis, got home a day late, then had to drive to Heathrow for the bags. So when Pan-Am said after Lockerbie that they never flew unaccompanied baggage they were being very economical with la verite. The idiots managed to offend not just a
regular business flyer (me) but someone on whom the airline’s very livelihood depended, and thus Pan-Am went to the bottom of a certain travel agent’s recommended airlines list.
I was at Miami International, a Pan-Am hub, the day it was announced they’d gone out of business. I shed no tears and I didn’t have to wonder why. Their motto should have become: I’m useless, don’t fly me. Fade out.
