Has anyone travelled via British Airways lately? I wouldn’t be surprised if there has been a significant decline in ticket sales as a result of some recent hikes in prices. I fly out to Norway every year and a half or so and BA has always been my airline of choice. I don’t know why that is. Maybe the flight attendants’ British accents provide the illusion of class. I’d like to think that they simply offer a high quality of service. Whatever the reasons may be, I had to do without them this time around. I’ve paid as much as $1,700 Cdn for a round-trip flight and to me that was absurd. I wasn’t about to cough up more than two grand for the same flight.

Air Canada seemed to have a more economical choice available. I could fly to the land of the Vikings for $1,200, a far cry from the $2,400 that BA was trying to steal from my pocket. It was a done deal. I anticipated tight spaces, unattentive flight attendants, starvation and dehydration. But that’s ok. It was only a nine hour flight to London. Groan.

People have told me that I often (ok always) have a glass half empty look on life but I think it has served me well to do so. Planning for worst case scenarios just means I get to be pleasantly surprised more often when things go the other way. In this instance, not only was I well fed and hydrated, I noticed a sizable difference in the seat alotted to each Air Canada passenger. I actually had space between my knees and the chair in front of me! I knew I wasn’t hallucinating because my fiancee also felt more comfortable and he’s a typically tall Scandinavian. For the first time, it wouldn’t have been excrutiating if he hadn’t gotten a aisle seat.

The only downside to the flight? As you can see from the picture below, I wasn’t able to see over the seat in front of me. The first thing we noticed when we boarded the plane was the lack of video screens on the back of the seats. We had gotten so used to BA that we had forgotten what it’s like to fly with primitive entertainment technology. I think I’m relatively tall for a Chinese person but I could barely make out the frame of the white screen that was about ten rows from ours. Gone was the option of a variety of channels to surf and movies to wile away the hours. Even if I were to sit closer to the screen, the earsets provided by AC were made such that I would need to press them against my ears in order to mute the massive noise from the plane and hear the dialogue clearly. They were much more comfortable than the plug in sort but what’s the point when you can’t hear a darn thing. With the blinds that were stubbornly left open by some passengers (despite being told to shut them out of courtesy to others), the images on the screen were too light to make out anyway.

So if you remember to bring along a few of your favourite magazines or a guaranteed good book, you should have a fairly pleasant flight. I am an absolute TV and movie addict but despite the severe lack of in-flight entertainment, I would still choose to fly with Air Canada in the future because to be able to stretch out my legs while I’m sitting is heaven.

On a final note, those shoehorn neck pillows that you see in all the travel shops and sporting goods stores may be worth the few bucks it costs to get one. A good friend of mine gave me an inflatable (very convenient) Samsonite pillow on the day I left for Norway and it was a life saver.