Historians will look back at the first years of the 21st century and come to the conclusion that everyone in the world enjoys total luxury when flying. Bloggers write about the premium experience and completely overlook the reality behind the curtain.
The curtain divides the economy class cabin from business class and you’re not getting through unless you have the correct paperwork. This article shows what the majority of travellers experience when flying in the 21st century.
Boarding via a Jetbridge
When boarding is called, passengers in front of the curtain are usually on board first. Once their queue is empty, the much longer queue begins the walk onto the aircraft.
Flying Behind The Curtain
Once on board, you take your seat. Invariably someone will be sat right next to you, resulting in a few centimetres of clearance between you and your seat mate. If they are hefty, sometimes you will touch for the whole flight.
On Board Service
Cabin crew come by with a trolley and ask if you want to buy something. Will it be a sandwich? Tea? Coffee? How about a bottle of water? That’ll be £1.80 please. Nothing is free in economy class.
For the rest of the flight, you’re on your own. No smiling crew offering refills or chit chat or extra food. You will see the crew again to clear any rubbish, then it is time to land. At this stage the curtain is opened again, you land and you get off the flight.
Overall Thoughts
Consider the record set straight. Virtually everyone who travels by air sits behind the curtain and experiences a short haul flight as I have outlined above. For the historians reading this in 2586, this is the reality for most people.
Flights are comfortable and get you from A to B without much fuss which, though you may be led to believe otherwise, is the actual purpose of taking a flight.
Have you got any good or bad stories about flying in economy class? I’d love to hear them! Thank you for reading and if you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.
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Tell me more about this luxury experience for the other half!!
I have to admit, where there is a curtain, it might be a thing about being Irish and rejecting the class system, or it might just be some sort of FOMO, but I have this innate discomfort sitting behind it. There’s nothing worse than flying a full service airline and being behind the iron-coloured curtain. It feels like we’re adding three hours to the seven hundred years of oppression or something, so I know it’s terribly wasteful but I do fly club europe a lot more than I ought to.
This is why I love Ryanair, and EI. Equality does have a lovely feel to it, except for everyone trying to break the rules and sit in seats they didn’t pay for. So you can’t win, and you go on BA, where you sit in a cabin where the only rules people break are you know, international tax evasion and such like. ;-D
I’ve noticed on Swiss that they don’t always bother with the curtain AND they give *G’s an empty middle seat, so every seat feels like business class. Interesting though that yes, so few bloggers really bother with sharing content that will make a difference in the life of the average traveller, such as ‘hey bring a battery pack, hey bring an iPad, hey bring noise cancelling headphones, hey bring a lot of water, hey maybe get a lounge credit card if you travel a lot, don’t if you don’t.’
I agree with you completely. I also fly Club Europe far more than I should as I would rather have the full service from my full service airline. Though, I do use Avios for that more often than not. It only just struck me that the curtain is iron-coloured! I’m never going to forget that haha!
Very true that Ryanair and Aer Lingus with the one cabin gives a feeling of equality. I really don’t mind flying with either, though if I want to eat something I’ll go with Aer Lingus since the Ryanair food can be an abomination.
SAS actually have no curtain, they just have have little SAS Plus cards which they pop into the back of the last seat for that class of travel. Swiss seem to do it pretty well if they make sure Star Alliance Gold have a middle seat empty. More airlines should do that!
I’ll make a note of your suggestions there… “Essential Items That Every Traveller Should Consider Bringing Onboard” might be a future post of mine now
Thanks for the comments!