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Back to the future for aviation: Whiteboard departure screens, cheques and no check-in luggage

Yes, it's been a throwback week for British aviation, but Simon Calder isn't about to get misty-eyed for the past

Simon Calder
Travel Correspondent
Saturday 25 August 2018 18:50 BST
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Board games: gassengers at Gatwick trying to discover their departure gates
Board games: gassengers at Gatwick trying to discover their departure gates

This week, the travel industry has travelled back in time.

In the early hours of Monday, at the start of what is the busiest-ever week for UK aviation, Gatwick went back to basics when its destination screens went on the blink.

The airport deployed its “manual contingency plan”: airport staff scrawling information on whiteboards and yelling out gate numbers. It was a salient reminder of the need, just in case your smartphone decides to power down, to have your own manual contingency plan in the form of a printed-out boarding pass.

With airlines unwilling to delay planes for lost souls wandering the corridors of Gatwick, 200 passengers missed their flights. Hopefully they had sorted themselves out by Wednesday, when it was Ryanair’s turn to reveal a retro approach to finance.

The budget airline confirmed it had sent out 190 unsigned cheques. Older people wondered: “How could a vast and wealthy firm make such a blunder?”. Younger people wondered: “What’s a cheque?”

And on Thursday the Irish airline announced that, from November, it will return to the age when everyone checked in their baggage. Well, not everyone. Expert packers who can compress their luggage into a 20-litre bag, and passengers who are prepared to pay £6 for priority boarding, will be able to take their possessions on board. Everyone else will have to check it in, at prices starting at £8 for a 10kg case.

Previously the airline’s bosses said they wanted no-one to check in luggage in order to cut costs. But now they need bags in the hold to speed flights.

You may be annoyed that Ryanair’s policy reversal does not go back to the time, only a dozen years ago, when every airline ticket included the right to check in a bag for free. And while you’re enjoying 2006, you might recall that was the last time you could carry as much water, wine and whisky as you could squash into your cabin baggage allowance – and seats on short-haul flights could recline.

But before your get too vexed over bag fees and misty-eyed about the past, consider all the elements of aviation that have disappeared and which we are much better off without.

Starting with old-style paper tickets. These multi-paged miniatures certainly bestowed a frisson of excitement, with enigmatic carbon-copy capitals on flimsy paper that heralded a multitude of adventures. But they had to be laboriously (and expensively) written out, and were simply one more item to fret about.

In 1995, easyJet showed the way with a flat refusal to issue paper tickets, and slowly the rest of the airline world followed suit.

Next, check-in desks. Agreed, the Gatwick blank-screen fiasco would have been less serious in the olden days, when the option to go straight to and through security did not exist, a check-in agent could say: “Here’s your boarding pass, head for gate 23.”

But that is small consolation for wasting an hour in a queue simply to say: “I bought this ticket some time ago and now I am required formally to register my intention to travel. Please tear out one of those flimsy pages and exchange it for a piece of cardboard with a seat number on it.”

Many more reasons to be cheerful about aviation in 2018 abound. Airlines can no longer delay and cancel planes with impunity, at least in theory. On board smoking (and, by extension, secondary smoking) is banned.

The two greatest virtues of air travel in 2018, though, make this the best of all possible eras: the timeless values of affordability and safety.

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