Flying has changed.

For one thing, if you book a flight on a particular day, at a particular time, there is no guarantee that you’ll actually be flying on that day. My Finnair flight, from Hong Kong to Helsinki, then on to London Heathrow,  originally at midnight on Wednesday was changed to the morning of the following Friday, initially cutting 2.5 days off my trip. They changed our return flights too, with the result that we flew back separately and are now home quarantining separately. Airlines can do this unilaterally, it seems. I think there is compensation available but you’re getting to the back of queues that are already months long.

I’m speculating that these sorts of changes are because of changing quarantine and Covid testing regulations for flight crew and, of course, changing demand for flightsm which is only now starting to pick up from almost nothing a couple of months ago.

Similarly, our BA flight from London City airport to Edinburgh was replaced by a flight that departed from Heathrow, which meant that the journey from home in South London was almost twice as long as the flight.

This flight was absolutely packed and no social distancing was possible at all. Policing of mask regulations by cabin crew was quite lax and I was quite concerned that I’d catch the virus from any one of the several young people sitting around me who weren’t wearing their masks properly.

Few staff are available to help you check in your luggage at the airports. At London Heathrow, the replacement of helpful humans by machines was evident and I couldn’t help thinking that this would be a handy way of cutting staff permanently in the longer term. 

Now, Hong Kong International Airport is one of the world’s busiest and offer dozens of high-end shopping opportunities for tourists. In some ways it’s just another glitzy mall. All of these shops are currently closed, as are the restaurants and most of the airline lounges. It looks like a hopeless, dismal ghost town, no longer an exciting place of bustle and new departures. Finnair has closed its lounge temporarily so we were directed to the Plaza Premium lounge, a misnomer if ever there was one. Though the few staff on duty at that early hour were friendly enough, there was very little choice of breakfast – ordered by app and delivered to your table as you go to a machine for your hot drink – for someone who’d had to get up really early to catch the (now hourly only) airport bus. I settled for an over-mayonnaised pre-pack sandwich.

Once through the sad, deserted departure gates and into the plane, we were immediately given a pack of sanitising wipes and a sachet of hand sanitiser. You’re masked all the time, of course, but we are used to that here, having been required to wear masks indoors and out in public since July. Seriously, it’s annoying having to take them off and put them on all the time, so we just leave them on.

The view from the windows on taxiing to take off was of the ranks of unused planes just lined up on the taxiways waiting until people want to fly again. I suspect that it will be a while before there will be enough people to make it worthwhile to run A380 superjumbos on these routes, if ever, though flying on a smaller, more fuel-efficient plane was a bit of a salve for my conscience.

We were encouraged to stow as much luggage as possible under the seats in order to minmise the standing up and sitting down, and walking aground the cabin or socialising is strongly discouraged. Cabin service has been adjusted to provide the minimum of interaction betweeen crew and passengers – on a trip to the loo I observed crew strapped into their jump seats for much of the journey. There’s no pre-flight drinking or bonhomie. It’s efficient and cool, subdued and rather sad.

I chose Finnair because it offers the shortest flight – around 9 hours – between Hong Kong and Europe and there’s no changing at the once-bustling souk that is Dubai Airport, which is a big plus in these times. I once caught a really nasty virus from a woman who did a huge sneeze in the same lift as me at DXB. Sometimes you just know.

On balance, I preferred it. Helsinki airport is  tiny in comparison with Dubai and felt a bit like I’d landed at Biggin Hill. Nearly all of the shops and restaurants on the non-Schengen side were closed so I was glad of the quick connection time. Gatwick, where I’d normally arrive is still shut, so it was a private taxi journey from Heathrow to home and peace.

On my return journey, the lounge that was open was on the Schengen side so I was obliged to go through passport control to the  merrier Schengen side world of open shops and restaurants and a lounge styled with Nordic decor and then back again through passport control to my gate. This confused me for a while: now that the UK has left the EU, should I, with my burgundy passport, use the EU counter or not? Sadly I decided that there wasn’t time for an argument and that it would not have been the stern-looking Finnish border control’s fault that ignorant dickheads slavishly believed the lies that they read on the side of a bus so, for the first time in decades, I went through “Non-EU and Other passports.”

Though Finnair is the same as other airlines in assuring passengers that it makes efforts to distance its passengers, I found surprisingly little evidence of that. Before the pandemic hit the airlines, business class passengers were not charged for selecting their seats. It now appears that all window seats are available only on payment of an extra fee, one way to try and make some money on the flight perhaps. So you are assigned a seat in the middle of the cabin and mine was directly in from of a concerned-looking French couple. I was also concerned. Once boarding was finished, however, it became clear that there were only 9 of us in this cabin and we were permitted to move to window seats further away, to everyone’s relief, I’m sure. It’s a long flight sitting near to someone from a country with climbing infection rates. Economy Class, I might add, was even more sparely-occupied on both journeys. People just don’t want to fly unless they have a very good reason. 

On my return to Hong Kong last week I immediately entered the mandatory 14 day quarantine. My airport Covid 19 test was negative so I’m spending it at home. If you can’t quarantine at home, you have to have pre-arranged a hotel stay for two weeks. * Had my test been positive, I’d be in isolation in hospital. People travelling with others who have tested positive are sent to government quarantine centres.

I’m currently half way through my quarantine so I thought I’d talk about this process in detail in a different post, which will appear after my quarantine has finished.

 *At the time of publishing this post a change was imminent. The UK is about to be named as a high-risk area which means that a negative test result before the flight will be mandatory and that the 14 days’ quarantine will take place in a quarantine hotel. I can’t blame the HK government for trying to prevent a fourth spike of the virus, especially since the second and third spikes were largely imported. Frankly I blame dickheads who think of nothing but their own immediate gratification and no-one but themselves.