I'm sitting in my seat reading my newspaper as the flight attendants start their safety demonstration. I barely look up or listen, along with the majority of passengers in the cabin. If I look around, the seats are filled with people looking to fill in the next hour or so on their technology of choice, catching up on sleep they missed out on, by getting this early flight or checking their mileage points online. These are the "road warriors", the "FF" boys looking for the next level of recognition, the "lounge hounds" who spend more time at airports than at home.
Seat belts need to be tightened thus, while life jackets are adjusted just so and in case of emergencies face masks will fall from the ceiling in a timely manner. Life rafts (c'mon we're flying over land already) and emergency positions of heads between knees, all pass in one ear and out the other. No one listens.
Is it because we have so much trust in this aluminum canister and in the guy up front who is a faceless voice reassuring us that we'll catch up time from the late departure? Is the safety record so phenomenal that we feel safer here than in our car at home? Are the dulcet tones of the flight attendants sending us into a trance? Or is it a numbness born of a 1000 flights, hearing the same messages and breathing the rarefied air that give the cabin a look of passengers without care? The cabin remains quiet and the flight attendants go about their duties in silent efficiency.
I try not to be blasé about air travel because it really is a marvel if you think about it for more than 30 seconds. Now being cool, internationally stylish and looking like you've done this a 1000 times, is something altogether different. Looking like you belong with cool indifference and a sense of status in your walk is the realm of the corporate executive in today's business world.
Travel for these passengers is as much about how they look travelling as to the experience itself. It's about having the right luggage, sitting in the right seat and most certainly having the right sunglasses on. Even on short domestic hops it is easy to pick the "Gold and Platinum" flyers with the latest technology, the best seats and on first name basis with the flight attendants. The recognition associated with regularly flying our skies is an aspiration for many and as the numbers grow the cabins will become ever more quiet and private club like, where members nod at each other in silent recognition and wink at the flight attendant in their best George Clooney guise. Surely cigars have to make a comeback soon?
So the search for more points to gain higher levels is not about where to take the family on that next points holiday but more about recognition and levels of comfort, so they can sit there cool and indifferent because on the ground that kind of recognition is difficult to attain and it's hard to tell one corporate executive from another.
Recognition and status are hard earned in life but with a good corporate travel policy and companies intent on doing business face to face (the only way) recognition and fake sincerity can be quickly provided by frequent flyer programs, so much so, that the the skies will continue to fill up with flyers aspiring to the George Clooney look.
Now where did I put those sunglasses?
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