I boarded a plane after seven years flight-free – flying has got so much worse

Somewhere between the 90-minute check-in queue in Tokyo, the two-hour connecting flight to Seoul, the hour-long wait for security and the 14 hours’ airborne from the South Korean capital to London Heathrow, I really started to question my life choices.

This, my recent journey home after a month spent travelling through Australia, New Zealand and Japan, was hellish enough to almost negate the enjoyment of the four weeks preceding it. It was certainly unpleasant enough to put me off flying for the remainder of my natural life.

That first decades-long queue to check my suitcase took place in the stiflingly warm terminal of Tokyo’s Narita airport at 1am. I’d prioritised price over comfort when booking the return journey, a decision I now appeared to be receiving cosmic punishment for. When I finally got to the desk, the staff member announced with ill-concealed glee that my bag was overweight; I’d unwittingly booked Asia’s answer to Ryanair, and that mistake would now be costing me roughly the price of a kidney in excess baggage charges. Oh, and I would have to queue up at yet another desk in order to cough up my pound of flesh.

Once in Seoul, my dreams of hightailing it to the gate for a few hours’ kip, lying blissfully horizontal across an entire row of chairs, were dashed by the airport’s intriguing decision to open just two security lanes to serve several hundred passengers. If there was aircon, it certainly wasn’t detectable.

And then, that final, endless leg to the UK. Wedged into a seat that seemed considerably less roomy than those found on a Megabus, next to two women who kept dropping their personal belongings on me (one of whom sat sideways and touched me with her bare feet), I contented myself with the thought that at least I could watch some of the latest blockbusters. But this notion proved laughably optimistic; the supplied headphones were of such poor quality that not one word of dialogue was discernible. The only subtitles offered were, naturally, in Korean.

One thought kept circling my head on rotation during this waking nightmare: Why, oh why, do we voluntarily do this to ourselves? Why, unless strictly necessary, would one choose to pretzel oneself into a tiny, cramped space aboard a glorified sardine tin, to be hurled through the sky at altitude?

I’m admittedly more sensitive than most to the indignities of flying now, having given up air travel for the best part of seven years. My last flight was in 2019; seeing the environmental harm that travel emissions were causing in a worsening climate crisis, I decided to take the Flight Free UK pledge, a kind of New Year’s resolution to swear off flying for the following 12 months. I only ever envisaged it lasting a year, but the next one came and I felt compelled to make that same pledge again. And again. And again. And again…

Sustainability may have been the initial driver, but the joys of flight-free travel were what kept me coming back for more. I fell head over heels for trains and ferries, buses and bikes, even the slowest of slow travel options: using my own two legs as transport. Trips felt like adventures, and the time spent getting there evolved into something that evoked just as much anticipation as the destination itself.

My decision to get back on a plane was prompted by a range of factors – the sheer impracticality of reaching Oz by sea, for one – and wasn’t taken lightly. But, once I had taken the plunge and booked a grand total of seven flights, I felt a tentative shoot of excitement unfurl at the idea of leaving on a jet plane once more after such a substantial hiatus.

I remembered the thrill of getting to the airport, picking up some essentials from Boots, maybe an impulse sunhat from Accessorize, and grabbing a G&T from the airport bar.

I reminisced about stepping onboard the aircraft, imbued with the subtle glamour of inhabiting a whole new world in the sky that existed outside the laws of time – a place where you could drink mini bottles of wine at 7am and watch four Hollywood movies back to back while chain-eating dry roasted peanuts without the tiniest glimmer of guilt.

It turns out the romanticised idea of air travel I’d created in my head was, while charming, total nonsense. After a lengthy gap, let me tell you, definitively – it’s not just in your head. The whole experience of flying really has drastically deteriorated in those intervening years.

On the outward leg, I coincidentally happened to be flying with the exact same Asian airline I’d taken for my final flight in 2019, and was thereby able to make a direct comparison. This is a carrier that often wins awards and ranks highly in all those “best airline” lists. And yet, even here, everything seemed measurably worse.

The seats felt smaller, the legroom more cramped. The gratis-to-use blankets, though still present, looked tired and worn. Even the service was intermittent, with very little chance of requesting those much-anticipated mini wines – the only thing that might have lent the whole thing a tolerable sense of jollity, outside of mealtimes. And, while the food itself was surprisingly edible, the whole meal service was painfully drawn out, seeming to take hours for cabin crew to traverse the length of the economy cabin.

According to the stats, airline pitches – the distance between your headrest and the one in front, the strongest indicator of legroom – have shrunk from an average of 35 inches in 2011 to 31 inches today in economy class. Seats have also become narrower as airlines have squeezed in more seats for cash. Boeing originally conceived its 787 with eight seats per row in economy, for example, with a generous seat width of 18.5 inches (47cm); nearly every airline has configured it with an extra seat per row instead, in a 3-3-3 formation. That means an additional 15 seats per cabin, at a reduced width of 17 to 17.5 inches (43 to 44 cm).

This has all happened, of course, as humans have grown in size, with more plus-size passengers complaining of the discomfort caused by shrinking seats. Load factors have also been calculated so precisely, and flights strategically overbooked as a result, that the idea you’d ever get a free seat next to you on which to spread out is now outrageously unlikely.

More seats stuffed in also often means narrower aisles, hence why it feels more difficult to trundle your wheelie suitcase to your seat, and why flight attendants seem to be so slow when wheeling the refreshment trolley up and down.

Then there are the passengers themselves. Ryanair boss Michael O’Leary recently called for airports to be banned from serving alcohol to passengers before early morning flights, revealing that the airline was being forced to divert an average of nearly one flight a day because of disruptive behaviour onboard, up from one a week a decade ago.

Any sense of glamour that might have been associated with flying has long been stripped away thanks to today’s startling lack of etiquette, with travellers believing they can tear up the social contract and do whatever they please once they’re cruising at 35,000ft. From starting drunken brawls and wearing inappropriate outfits to clipping toenails and performing sex acts, people have simply forgotten how to behave on planes. Perhaps I should count myself lucky that I got away with merely having a stranger’s feet pressed against my thigh.

Finally, there’s the airport experience. It surely should have improved thanks to improved technology and more efficient processes, but the opposite seems to be true. Part of this is the sheer volume of travellers; new UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) data has shown that UK aviation started the year with record passenger numbers. But it’s only set to get worse this summer as new post-Brexit border checks under the Entry Exit System (EES) are leading to lengthy queues for British holidaymakers travelling back from Europe. Wizz Air boss Yvonne Moynihan has advised passengers to arrive at the airport a full three hours before their flight to be on the safe side.

While I don’t regret my decision to travel halfway around the world, I must confess that I didn’t enjoy a single second of getting there. And as air traffic and passenger numbers continue to swell unabated, the whole aviation experience is only going to get worse.

So you can keep your “chicken or fish?” options, tiny booze bottles and frankly criminal lack of legroom – turns out flight-free is the life for me after all.