I’ve often wondered why some airlines get security to check passports at the boarding gate and some don’t. Do those that do think we bluffed our way through immigration? Do they think that having got into the airport and therefore out of the country I’m going to sell my passport to some homeless person or criminal who resides in the airport and must also have bluffed their way in? Maybe some passports expire between checking in and boarding the flight although that’s a seriously long connection time.

So not only do some places make it difficult to leave (although I think multiple passport checks may have more to do with where you’re going rather than where you’ve been) I have actually seen people trying to negotiate their way into a country. I saw a family of Sikhs in animated discussion with an Indian immigration desk official one night – much arm waving, finger wagging and raising of voices on both sides. They were carrying non-Indian passports but had apparently overlooked the requirement to spend some money on an entry visa. How they got that far I’ll never know as the conclusion of the saga was played out in a room elsewhere in the airport. But as I was standing behind them in the queue I got chapter and verse of the first stage of the negotiation.
And a longer than normal trip through officialdom.

While on the subject of security, have you ever checked in, gone through immigration and customs, discovered you haven’t put a baggage tag on your hand-carry which must be stamped at the gate before you can board (very officious I know but such are the ways of some countries) and returned to get one? Remember, you have left the country once through immigration. I had occasion to do this once so walked back through customs and immigration to the check-in desk, got a baggage tag and walked back through immigration and customs completely unmolested. Unbelievable. I suspect things have tightened up a tad since then.

In a similar vein, a few years ago I worked for a large Brazilian company and so was required to visit head office in Rio de Janeiro occasionally. Now travelling in and out of South America is a challenge at the best of times and requires patience to accommodate long flight delays, agility when required to consider all available options and put together an alternative itinerary on the run and deep (corporate) pockets to take advantage of any of those available options.

I sat on the Rio tarmac (actually in the plane which was stationary on the tarmac) for about 4 hours once while the flight crew tried to get someone to fix the plane’s weather radar. It was late at night and no one came so I missed my connection in Buenos Aires and resigned myself to another night in Rio. The ground crew off-loaded us and escorted us through the dark and deserted terminal, back past the unoccupied immigration and customs desks and out to the front of the terminal where buses were arranged to take us to hotels. We, the passengers (and crew, I guess) had left the country earlier that day and were still officially outside the country when we came back in late that evening. Mañana.

You’d think in the circumstances that there would have been fairly stringent controls on our whereabouts and some rather definite arrangements for our return to the airport and escorting back out of the country. But no, not the case. Without some rather stern discussions with the desk clerk in our hotel (which was about as far away from the airport as it’s possible to be and still be in Rio city – western part of Barra if you know the place), resulting in some phone calls to the airline to remind them to send transportation for the 15 or so people from the flight in that hotel, we may have been there a bit longer.

We arrived back at the airport with not much time to spare but with no one to meet us so we approached the check-in counter and the clerk waved us through a gate which bypassed the formalities and we were back airside in no time. Easy as that. It’s harder to get through Mount Isa airport in outback Queensland.

So when I hear of airport security snafu’s, am I surprised? No, actually.

Have you ever been bumped? Not like being bumped when someone walks into you although in this day and age there are too many people who walk around staring at their phones and rely on the few of us who don’t to avoid walking into them. I’ll let you in on a secret – occasionally I do. Walk into them, that is. After all, someone has to. I could be a bus so in reality I’m saving them from themselves. No, I mean bumped off a flight.

If you fly often enough this is inevitable. Back in the prehistoric days when travellers were required to reconfirm flights at least 3 days before flying, this was a regular occurrence. Certainly it was for me. I’d do a week long trip that would involve maybe seven or eight flights. As if I’m going to be ringing China Airlines in Seoul to confirm I’ll be on the flight from Kaohsiung to Taipei on Thursday. Fortunately reconfirmation is no longer required so the possibility of being the bumpee is significantly reduced.

That’s not to say it doesn’t still happen. Consequently one needs an array of weapons in one’s armoury to counter this possibility and regain your seat. Where and when these weapons should be used is a matter of personal choice because circumstances change, obviously.

The least effective and least assertive is resigning yourself to joining the other poor saps on stand-by. I am aware of circumstances where rather unscrupulous travellers have pretended to be someone they know who is confirmed on the flight, ringing the airline and cancelling that person’s booking and thereby moving up the waitlist. If this manoeuvre can be combined with an agreement with the unscrupulous booking clerk to place you at the head of the waitlist prior to exercising said manoeuvre, all the better.

One of my favourites is “I have an international connection”. This has limited efficacy if you are flying into an airport with no international connections. Also, when stating this it is not necessary to go full indignation. That will come later in more suitable circumstances.

One I have used on a number of occasions is “I am a guest in your country” and at the same time trying to convey an air of superiority and importance. It helps to be wearing a suit and tie and have many old baggage tags stuck on your luggage. This doesn’t work in places like Australia or the UK where people who work in the service industries don’t know the difference between being a servant and offering a service. Any sort of air at all will immediately throw the check-in person on the defensive and you’re more likely to go on a no-fly list rather than get a seat on this particular flight. This theme will be revisited in the future when we discuss flight attendants across a range of airlines.

A variation on the above theme which can be quite effective is “I am a guest of your government”. This works particularly well in countries where governments have been known to be rather nasty to their citizenry on occasions. And if you’re selling coal like I was, to a government owned power utility or steel mill, it’s technically correct. In the places where this tactic has been known to work, it can be complemented by an appropriate dose of indignation.

If none of these have worked and the blood pressure is causing your ears to move in and out you still have a plethora of options, namely threats, lies and bribes.

“I’ll have your job” qualifies as a threat and a lie and only works in the most unique circumstances like when the airport manager is standing next to you. Frantic lies like dying relatives or multimillion dollar deals at stake only work in certain places if accompanied by an “incentive”….. so I’ve been told. Never seen it done though. Okay, I’ve seen it done on a train. You might “incentivise” the check in person to give you the “last remaining seat” which happens to be in first class. This is when you discover that some airlines number their seats differently as this particular first class seat is designated 47D and it’s the middle seat in the smoking section despite smoking having been banned many years before.

Notwithstanding all of the above a smile and patience work equally well.

If you asked the average Ellen DeGeneres audience or a random selection of current Ivy League college students in the United States to raise their hand if they knew that Vienna is the capital of Australia, I bet half of them would.

I see an Airbus A380 threw a shoe somewhere over the Atlantic yesterday. That’s pilot lingo for a catastrophic and explosive engine failure. Actually I made the “lingo” thing up. Fortunately these planes have three spares so despite an unscheduled pit-stop in some godforsaken, frozen wasteland called Goose Bay in outback Canada, just up the road from Mud Lake, all’s well.

What is the connection between these two statements? You may well ask. It may take me a little while to get there but here goes.

One of the many dates I chose to start writing my travel book was July 1st 1992. This date was very marginally auspicious because my flight had just touched down in Tokyo. Nothing special about that you may well posit, but the particular airline which was benefiting from my custom that day was rather infamous at the time for bits falling off their planes. It was and is one of the largest airlines in the world which was just as well because they regularly needed to replace parts which they kept losing, in-flight rather alarmingly. Nothing serious like a wing you understand, just the occasional door or engine or wing flap. This did however raise serious issues of safety like do I keep my seatbelt on and go out with the seat or should I attempt to grab whatever is locked down before being sucked though the rather disconcerting hole in the fuselage. So surviving this flight was for me, rather auspicious. I resisted the urge to belabour this point by making an “I survived the ride on Flight—— “ t-shirt.

The airline is question was an American airline and not long after the date of my safe arrival in Tokyo, a number of American airlines began pulling out of the Australian route. There’s a joke there that Australians will understand and Americans won’t. One airline remained loyal to the trans-Pacific corridor and here’s where we link the first two apparently unrelated sentences in this piece.

Despite the fact that most Americans don’t know where Australia is, back then their planes could find us by following the debris trail across the Pacific. Ta daaaa.