I flew the flag, as I think it was called, travelling with British Airways from Heathrow to New York JFK, flight BA175 on Saturday 28th August at 11:00 on an economy class return ticket costing £434. The details are clear to me today, even after all these years: I kept the ticket counterfoil.

I’d driven down from Manchester on Friday, to stay at Diana’s overnight in Orpington, which coincidentally gave me a free parking spot for my car. My hotel in Manchester was a in convenient city centre location and therefore had no car park. So I’d been driving between my hotel (free street parking in the evening) and my office (not-free parking in a car park which didn’t allow overnight stays) – a distance I could walk in ten minutes.

An 11:00 flight meant I didn’t have to get up outrageously early to travel by train. In the days before intensive airport security checks, you could arrive just an hour before, so it was easy enough to catch train and tube from Orpington to Heathrow.

Looking online, I find that now (July 2021) I could book the same trip on Virgin for £449 ‘Basic Economy’ or £539 ‘Main Cabin’, which raises three points of interest. First, flying is much cheaper now (allowing for inflation); too cheap, you might say. Second, 28th August this year is also a Saturday, which is going to make getting the days and dates right for this report a lot easier. Third, where the hell is ‘Basic Economy’ if it’s not in the main cabin? Being towed behind like a glider caravan?

This was my first intercontinental flight. I’d been on a couple of flights to France before, on school exchange visits, and to Brussels on business, but this was my first time to anywhere far away. I wrote down in my notebook a number of trenchant and biting observations about air travel in economy class, which of course no one had ever written down before. Since my TAFF trip, I’ve been to Africa several times, the far east, North America a couple of times and elsewhere in Europe, and spent ten years commuting to The Hague two or three times a month, so air travel has lost whatever charm and novelty it once might have had.

Today, I don’t really want ever to fly again – the CO2 emissions, you know.

So there I am on the plane. I have a middle seat. I can see out of the window over the shoulder of my neighbour on the inside, but later in the flight I am unable to tell if it is sea or cloud in view below us. Presumably the captain knows. Or if he doesn’t, the co-pilot.

The cabin stewards and stewardesses have blue jackets, presumably to distinguish them from holiday camp ‘redcoats’. I am half-expecting a call of ‘Hi de hi!’ They hand out blue headsets for sound which you plug into the arm rest. I have never figured out how they work, because they seem to be plastic tubes, not wires, doing the connecting. Plugged into everyone’s ears, they make the plane look like a convention of doctors.

A double gin and tonic sets me back £1.00 in economy class – free for Crown, First and Club class. I reckon the £1 is a bargain, compared to the extra hundreds of pounds you’d pay for the other classes. (And I’d be more than happy to buy a double gin and tonic for £1.00 now.)

I open the September 1982 issue of High Life, BA’s free in-flight magazine (free even in economy class). It has an article on Chicago, which I consider very apt, but inexplicably it fails to mention Chicon IV. I don’t know whether to be sad that the sf world’s premier event is passing without notice, or glad that fandom is still part of the underworld, a secret society known only to the select few (thousand).

There is a little pillow in a disposable, tough paper pillowcase which proves useful for resting books and magazines on. I suppose it could be used to rest my head on as well, but it’s daytime. Who sleeps in the daytime, especially at the beginning of an exciting expedition?

At 2 p.m. (BST) lunch, a marvel of compactness, is served from a plastic tray with doll’s house cutlery, though the forks have sharp points. The tray is fresh out of cold storage, with a chilled roll, hard unspreadable butter and frosty pate, which take some getting through. By the time I do, the hot main course – chicken with sweet and sour sauce – has cooled. The sauce is served in a little pot stuck to the tray by sauce overflow (a cunning manoeuvre to stop it flying off in case of turbulence, no doubt).

The captain, in his hat, walks through the plane, pausing to chat with the Club class passengers, and passing through Economy at a canter as if to avoid catching something.

I wipe my fingers with the lemon-scented BA towelette. It occurs to me, with the debris of lunch still on our knees, how much chaos I could cause by demanding to go for a pee. However, there is a queue for the toilet and my need is not urgent, so I elect for the quiet life.

I discover that I can stand up at my seat, beneath the overhead lockers, but only by thrusting knees forward, bottom back and head forward, such is the seat architecture. In this position I find myself peering straight down the cleavage of the girl in front. Or would have been had she not been wearing a turtle-neck sweater.

Sudden excitement! A stewardess removes the garish picture of Windsor Castle on a bulkhead, revealing a cinema screen no more than a metre wide. It is time for the film: “Evil under the Sun” with Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith. (No back of the seat screens and personalised selection of films in those days.)

Then we reach the American coastline. Looking past my neighbour again, I see Long Island with a thin white line all the way round it – continuous beach. The flight has taken 7½ hours, long enough for a child to learn to walk. I know this little factoid because one did, up and down the aisle beside me, hands raised grabbing on to her father’s fingers. Her father looks exhausted.

Leaving the plane, I get to Immigration (Immigration!!) where there is a long queue. An extra Immigration official appears, so there are then two long queues. Just ahead of me, in my queue, are four Kuwaiti students. I am inexperienced in the ways of Immigration, but learn soon enough that to be behind four Kuwaiti students is an error. Each one is quizzed minutely and at length about his course of study and means of support whilst in the USA, which so far as I can make out are identical for all four. Three are allowed through. The fourth has his papers put in a coloured folder and is told to visit the office over there. I am asked two or three questions (answers: chartered accountant; on holiday; something else) and waved through with a grunt. It’s mid-afternoon, Saturday 28th August 1982 and I am in!

I compare this with a trip to Houston in November 2004, flying business class on Continental Airlines. The seats were wide, the legroom more than adequate. I got chatting to the guy in the next seat (he was just about close enough not to have to shout) who turned out to be from Shell’s Legal department, also on a business trip to Houston. If we’d asked around I reckon we could have rustled up a few more Shell folk.

On the plane we had to fill in a green form with the exact address of where we would be staying; ‘Doubletree Hotel’ was not enough, they wanted street name and number. Fortunately, I had been warned about this and had the information, but several English tourists appeared not to. On arrival, the Immigration queues stretched out to vanishing point, but officials strode up and down with a Houston directory, helpfully looking up street addresses for people who only had hotel names, and managed this in a manner that implied: “I’m being helpful here, but I don’t like it.”

The guy on the Immigration desk looked much like the guy at JFK 22 years earlier – do they clone them? He started with the same question, but after the answer (on business, visiting Shell Oil headquarters in Houston) he said: “Welcome to the USA, sir” and waved me through.

My next USA visit was on holiday with Diana, just after I retired in 2010. We flew in to Boston, just after the Deepwater Horizon explosion and monster crude oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The immigration officer asked what line of business I had been in and I said ‘Oil.’ ‘Not BP?’ he said. ‘No, Shell.’ ‘That’s all right then,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your stay.’