Why I hate flying

I've discovered that I'm deathly afraid of flying. It's not things like fear of crashing that scare me, but rather what happens in the passenger cabin, the hassles of getting to and from the airport, procedures at the airport, etc.

Last night (the other day, actually - I've been having problems posting this), I came back from Malaysia on Air Asia, a Malaysia-based low-cost carrier (cost: approximately $100 CAD). By your standards, my flight may not have been such an ordeal, but it certainly was an eye-opening experience for me. The flight itself wasn't too spectacularly bad, but what happened before and after made things more difficult for me. Read for yourself:


From my hotel to the airport:

-left my hotel at 7:40pm; got to the train station at 7:52pm; rode express train from 8:00pm to 8:28pm

• It started raining extremely heavily just a few minutes before I had to leave my hotel
• It was tough to hail a cab during the thunderstorm - most taxis were occupied, and those that weren't were unwilling to take me to such a destination so close
• Though Indian cabbie agreed to send me to KL Sentral Stesion, he charged me 8 ringgit rather than the usual 5-7 ringgit (1 Malaysian ringgit = 32 cents CAD). I suppose it could have been worse - he could have charged me anything, and I really couldn't have refused!
• The KLIA Expres cost 35 ringgit (about $10 CAD), a bit expensive, if you ask me. By contrast, the buses from Beijing Capital Airport cost 16 yuan ($2.30 CAD) and even the bus I take to get to and from Hong Kong International Airport costs $21 HKD ($3.15 CAD). The silly thing is that I took the KLIA Expres 3 times in 3 days, including the round-trip I made to pick up my dad. (On the other hand, I realised that paying 25 ringgit ($7.89 CAD) for taking an airport bus really isn't worth it - it took more than 1.5 hrs from KLIA to the Petronas Towers!)

At the airport:

-arrived at 8:28pm; checked-in at 8:35pm; ate dinner at 8:45pm; arrived at gate at 9:25pm; boarded plane at 10:20pm.

• While checking in at the Air Asia counter, I was told that boarding would start 1 hour before take-off. When I looked at my boarding pass, I noticed that I was not assigned a seat. Then, I remembered that when I flew on Air Asia in 2003, passengers could sit wherever they wanted; this is called 'open seating'
• I asked the lady at the check-in counter whether or not a meal would be served on the flight. She said that there is no meal service on Air Asia flights, but that we could buy some snacks on board. I decided to eat dinner at the airport and to buy food and bring it on board to eat
• It was a very long walk to my gate. The LCC (low-cost carrier) wing of KLIA is pretty damned remote, quite far away from the check-in area, and not served by the aerotrain, but at least there are some motion-sensor-operated moving walkways
• As soon as I got to the gate, I discovered that the boarding time had been changed to 9:45pm
• I took a seat just 3 seats away from the boarding counter when I arrived at 9:25pm. I tried to read my Sociology readings, but women who looked like prostitutes kept talking on their mobile phones. I'm pretty sure that at least a dozen of them actually WERE prostitutes, and judging from the way they dressed and talked, they're probably from Mainland China, mostly from Fujian Province
• At 9:43pm, I moved towards the boarding counter, setting off a chain reaction: Three people who were already standing near the front of the counter raced to the front of the counter as soon as they saw me approach. I thought I would be fourth in line, but 4 or 5 of the friends and family members of those in front of me butted in. When I turned around, I noticed that EVERYBODY was scrambling to queue up
• Almost all 150+ passengers formed an orderly but impatient queue. We waited and waited and waited, thinking that we would start boarding at any minute. The guy at the front of the line placed his carry-on baggage onto the belt of the x-ray machine and the contents of his pockets in a tray. They would remain on the belt and in the tray for 55 minutes
• People behind me tried to budge in front of me. I 'spread my wings' and made sure this wouldn't happen. I'm pretty good with my elbows, and my backpack can work wonders
  The airport security staff began to arrive, one-by-one, at around 10:00pm. Every time a staffer arrived, the impatient passengers would get quite excited about the prospect of boarding. In total, 6 staff, all Malays, arrived, but all they did was sit behind the boarding and security counter and chat with each other
• At 10:20pm, we finally began to board! Although I was 10th in line, I was able to scramble past the high heel shoe-wearing grannies and prostitutes in front of me. I was first to board the plane!

Boarding the plane:

• I chose the aisle seat in the first row on the right side of the plane. If I were to sit in the first row on the left side of the plane, I would have had much more legroom, but since the passengers were boarding on the left side, I knew my feet would trampled if I were to sit there. At least I was in the front row - I HATE IT when people sitting in front of me recline their seats
• Even though my feet didn't get trampled, my left shoulder was the victim of numerous hits from carry-on baggage. I hate it when passengers don't check-in their luggage and bring everything into the passenger cabin
• The seats were narrower seats on any other airline, but fortunately, I was able to fit my fat ass into my seat
• Two guys from northeastern China sat beside me. They were relatively well-dressed and they SEEMED okay

The flight:
-took off at around 10:45pm

• There was no in-flight entertainment, not even radio or overhead TV screens, let alone personal TV screens
• The snacks available for sale were overpriced and included instant noodles, chocolate bars, and bags of chips. I was so glad I brought burgers from Burger King on board
• They turned the lights off during most of the flight, and I would have made people around me quite unhappy if I turned on the light to do my Sociology readings
• Soon after take-off, the two seemingly okay guys sitting beside me decided to take off their shoes and put them on the wall in front of us. The guy beside me took off his shoes first. He was wearing socks. He urged his friend to take off his shoes. "It's much more comfortable when you take off your shoes," he said. His friend wasn't wearing socks. What was more shocking was that the other guy had tattoos on each of his feet!
• The two seemingly okay guys sitting beside me became very bored. Perhaps out of boredom, the guy right beside me began to rub his face and brush his hair. I made a point of shifting in my seat and leaning in the opposite direction whenever he did so (which was quite often)
• Face rubbing and hair brushing gave way to nose picking, then ear picking, then fingernail biting. If they're going to do all of those things, I wish they'd use separate fingers, or at least do it in a different order. Disgusting!
• Quite a few people used the toilet at the front of the plane, which was about 2m from my seat. Not everybody closed the door. Some people came out with a trail of smoke following them. Non-smoking flight, eh?

(At least there were no crying babies or annoyingly loud kids or annoyingly loud adults)

Arrival? Not quite yet..

-touched down at around 2:15am; got out of plane at 2:20am; went through immigration at 2:23am; retrieved luggage at 2:30am; taxi to ferry terminal 2:37pm to 2:50pm; ferry to Hong Kong 3:00am to 4:05am; taxi to HKU 4:20am to 4:30am

• Fortunately, Macau International Airport is very very small and relatively user-friendly. Also, though I wasn't the first one out of the plane, I was the first to get to the immigration counter
• Because there was only one flight, the bags got to the carousels quite quickly
• Buses don't run at 3am in Macau, so I had to take a taxi from the airport to the ferry terminal. Cost: 46 pacatas, around $8 CAD. And Macau is SO SMALL! Taxis were so much cheaper in Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok
• The ferry to Hong Kong cost $178 HKD and took just over an hour. Fortunately, it was a Turbojet ferry, which is faster than other ferries
• Food service on the ferries is very expensive, yet so many people forked up $20 HKD for a bowl of instant noodles. I ate the second of my Burger King burgers on the ferry
• I took a cab to HKU. Cost: $25 HKD

There you go. Flying from KL to HK should only take a little over 3 hrs, and with express train links to their airports that whisk travellers to and fro in under 30 min, such journeys should take no more than 6 hrs. Perhaps the extra 3 hrs it took me were particularly painful because this was a red-eye flight, only the second time in my life I flew overnight within the same time zone, the first time being the time my family flew to Los Angeles via Las Vegas to catch a cruise ship. Still, I suppose flying is still better than travelling long distances by bus or train. Unless I'm driving, of course.