INTO THE FIENDLY SKIES

Dear Readers,

Does anybody remember when flying was fun? Was it ever fun?

Thanks to fuel prices, airline service cutbacks, fewer carrier choices and endless delays, we can now add the Christmas Day Underpants Bomber and it's resulting panic to the list that's making flying in a commercial airliner a misery for an awful lot of people.

Americans of a certain age look back wistfully at the days when airline dinners were a go-to joke for stand up comedians, but no more. Cheese-paring among airlines means that in the near-future, raffles will be conducted on long-haul flights to see who wins the 3 bags of crisps that will soon become the maximum amount of comestibles on any given aircraft. I, for one, now utterly regret turning up my snotty nose at the foil-wrapped, overheated Chicken Florentine with two veg that used to be placed on my fold-up tray by a reasonably friendly cabin crew member. The tray will probably be eliminated next, then movies, then seats, then air.

A grim reality of the 21st century is that flying has become a nerve-wracking, constitution-challenging ordeal. The perils of travelling from place to place in a commercial jet liner have increased, even as aircraft have become larger and more reliable. The quaint notion of dreading being sat next to the fattest person you've ever seen has now been replaced with the dread of sitting next to someone who decides to set fire to his shorts.

In America, the FAA no longer regulates air travel, which may comes as news to nobody but the FAA. No, the control of our skies (and that of many other nations) has devolved to Al Qaeda. From caves in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen-stan and maybe other 'stans' we've not heard of yet, terrorists pretty much determine how passengers are loaded, baggage stowed and takeoffs allowed, and it's a little worrisome that over eight years after 9/11, the handover has still not been acknowledged by our officials. And you thought it was taking a long time to build the Freedom Tower on the scar that was once the World Trade Center!

It's no good to just shrug and say that it's the problem of those who happen to fly, either. A plane that blows up in mid-air can theoretically crash down on anybody, even the most dedicated Luddite, and just because we've been reduced to strip-searching 89-year old grannies suspected of being a potential Depends Bomber doesn't mean that a disaster can't still occur. The thing about terrorists -often forgotten by comfortable and reasonable Americans - is that they may get caught 99 times out of a hundred, but that one success could be a whopper, and the terror-leaders are not concerned about getting their one, successful agent back, either.

Compared to what we're now up against, World War II looks like a polite war. When Germany and Japan surrendered and signed the documents, that was it - game over. But we can't win a war that has no stated goal - heck, we can hardly imagine how to fight it. In a war where the attackers only need an army of one guy with pyrotechnic Calvins to score a success, we're all potential walking collateral damage, no matter your religion, or lack thereof.

The people who are nominally in charge of security have got to face up to the fact that a 100% success rate in thwarting terrorists is the minimum standard, and they must work harder at analyzing data, screening dodgy people and sharing information with other nations who are similarly threatened(The Underpants bomber left a paper trail that practically outed himself as a risk, and nothing was done about it). And if you say that there's not enough people to do the job, well, a Terrorism Stimulus Program might not be a bad investment for putting the unemployed back to work - a much better idea than building pork-barrel bridges to nowhere.

What a boost for the economy it would be to have airports crawling with security staff and every flight manned (or womanned) with an agent sitting at the back with a loaded fire extinguisher at the ready.

Air travel will, sadly, never be the same as it was as recently as a decade ago, and there's no use trying to deny or ignore that fact. Once you actually get on the plane, you'll have to say goodbye to the pillows, blankets, peanuts, free drinks, free headphones, leg room, carry-on luggage and the in-flight entertainment that was once the norm for even bovine-class passengers. There is a bright spot, though, with the ban on the use of smartphones in-flight certain to be totally repealed, we can take nostalgic solace in watching You Tube clips of 80's comedians as we cruise at 30,000 feet, squashed into our seats - "Hey, what about that airline food, huh...?"