Simon Calder: The Man Who Pays His Way

Air-traffic control breakdown - miss a turn at Swanwick

Swanwick: a year ago, the word meant little to travellers from beyond south Hampshire. Nowadays, the name of this village is spat out by furious airline staff and their passengers, as the leading cause of delays for flights to and from the UK.

When the well-appointed £623m air-traffic control centre in Hampshire opened in January, it was over-budget, overdue and understaffed. The Railtrack of the skies, as National Air Traffic Services swiftly became known, caused severe delays to Britain's air travellers this year. Overstretched staff combined with underperforming technology led to a string of shutdowns that grounded hundreds of planes.

In this column's annual (and wholly unscientific) survey of flight performance, air-traffic control accounted for more delays than all other causes put together. In March, meltdown at Swanwick delayed my arrival home from Zurich by 20 hours. Even though that computer failure lasted only a few hours, the impact on airlines such as easyJet (on which I was intending to travel) was severe.

To keep costs down, no-frills airlines build little slack into the system, so the effects of disruption can reverberate for days. It took a train trip across Switzerland to Geneva to keep the delay to under 24 hours. So ended a less-than-triumphant trip that had started with me trying to check in at Luton for a flight to Switzerland that was scheduled to depart from Gatwick.

For most of the rest of the year, I managed to turn up at the right airport at roughly the right time. Volos in Greece was the most curious, since it doubles as a front-line base for the Hellenic Air Force. There was plenty of time for some light plane-spotting as everyone waited for the inbound BMI aircraft to arrive from Heathrow. We finally arrived three-and-a-half hours late. This time, the computer breakdown was at Terminal One check-in.

The wrong kind of snow held up American Airlines between Chicago and Calgary for three hours, and enabled me to pass on some first-hand experience to www.sleepinginairports.net ("Celebrating airport sleeping since July 11, 1996"). At Calgary, you can enjoy a wide range of comfortable, armrest-free benches – and the airport's baggage reclaims are art ensembles in their own right, proclaiming the glories of the West.

Most of the remaining delays were an hour or less, including the maiden flight of MyTravelLite, from Birmingham to Beauvais – ironically, after the new airline's boss, Tim Jeans, announced, "The one way to be sure you'll be on time is to take an airline's first flight."

Some British Airways captains appeared touchingly unaware of the propensity of air-traffic controllers to "stack" aircraft heading for the airline's home base at Heathrow. One captain of a shuttle flight from Glasgow to Britain's busiest airport promised "the very latest we will be is on time"; at the instant we were scheduled to arrive, we were circling over Buckinghamshire.

All four United flights I took arrived early, by an average of 18 minutes, which means one of two things: either the beleaguered giant US carrier is still getting things right despite its appalling financial losses, or it is "padding" its schedules to a ridiculous extent and should squeeze in a few more flights to get more out of its pilots and planes, and stem the outflow of cash.

In France, old travel bosses never die, they just get elected to their national parliament. A week before Christmas, Christian Blanc, the former chairman and managing director of Air France and RATP – the Parisian equivalent of London Transport – entered politics. He took up his seat in the French National Assembly on behalf of the centre-right UDF, as a member for the Yvelines constituency, which includes Versailles.

Britain's travel industry has a thin track record when it comes to supplying the nation with five-star politicians. The former Tory Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit was a British Airways pilot, while the former transport secretary and present deputy prime minister, John Prescott, was a steward for Cunard.

A trawl around the industry's memory banks reveals only a couple more: Neil Taylor, the director of the specialist tour operator, Regent Holidays, employed two leading Labour luminaries as tour leaders in the Eighties. The present education secretary, Charles Clarke, led a trip to Cuba in 1980, while Chris Mullin MP is happily married to the Vietnamese tour guide he met while on assignment for Mr Taylor in Hanoi. Oh, and Cherie Booth's mother was a travel agent; how different the past month might have turned out if she had worked as an estate agent instead.

We can only hope that the New Year's honours list will meet the need for the 21st-century travel business to be well represented at Westminster – not least to bring some much needed energy and innovation to the government's transport policy, and help avoid any more Swanwick-style calamities.

Step forward Stelios, the easyJet founder who stepped down from the airline last month. Surely the genial entrepreneur is just the person the government needs to inject some fresh thinking into the Department for Transport? A quick peerage, and Lord Easy of Luton could arise as the traveller's saviour. I called the founder of Britain's no-frills industry to find out whether the Palace had called. Alas, he has no appointment with the Queen. "I don't see myself as part of the establishment," he tells me. "I hope to contribute to society through entrepreneurship."

In the royal Christmas message, Her Majesty did not mention any plans to travel on easyJet in the coming year, so the prospect of a bright orange coat of arms must be put on hold.

"To travel abroad one must decide the best route, taking into account time, expense, available transport, etc," announces the box containing Go – The International Travel Game, which was big in the pre-PlayStation days of the Sixties. Travel has always been a favourite topic for manufacturers of board games. In the 18th and 19th centuries, when going overseas for pleasure was not an option for the vast majority of the population, games were based on the grand European tours that comprised gap years for aristocrats.

Until 1935, Waddington's of Leeds was in the packaging and playing-card business. In that year, it was approached by Parker Bros to produce a British version of Monopoly, with London as its focus. Despite an eccentric choice of streets and stations, which skewed millions of visitors' understanding of the capital, it has proved an enduring bestseller.

Monopoly's profits stimulated the board-game industry. Many, such as Air Charter, had relatively limited lifespans. But at Christmas 1961, one of the most eagerly unwrapped gifts was Go. I picked up a 40-year-old edition for £2 at a car-boot sale in Arundel, West Sussex; if you prefer to avoid trawling the nation's parking lots to find a copy of your own, call the board-game expert Alvin Ross on 01865 772409 or visit his website: www.vintage-games.co.uk.

Go celebrates the freedom bestowed by the jet age. The idea is to go around the world by air, sea, rail and road. Each player has two tokens, one to move around the perimeter, the other to travel the world. Players visit a series of cities, collecting souvenirs along the way; the first to reach the target achieves world domination and wins the game.

As always – in travel as in board games – funds are limited: £400 to start, amplified by £200 with each circuit of the board. To make matters trickier, currencies have to be exchanged. Fortunately, no commission is charged by the bureaux de change on the board's perimeter.

Mimicking the difficulties of travel in the Sixties, there are plenty of hazards to frustrate the traveller: from demands for excess baggage, to a flight diversion to the Falkland Isles. "Train breakdown – miss two turns while waiting for relief" may strike chords with some rail travellers in Britain. The player can get lucky, too, picking up a card that bestows diplomatic immunity at Customs instead of the usual £100 for duty, or a certificate of smallpox inoculation that avoids the need for quarantine.

An entrepreneur should come up with a 2003 version, featuring Eurostar trains and easyJet planes, as well as hazards such as Swanwick and the wrong kind of snow. Come to think of it, Go would be a fine name for a no-frills airline.

travel@independent.co.uk