What was it like flying with Ethiopian Airlines? That’s a question I’ve been asked a few times now, and understandably so. Afterall, in one of the poorest countries in the world where famine and drought are rift how can they possibly have a national airline?
I suppose the answer is that like everywhere in the world Africa has both its very rich and its very poor. Whilst many are starving and dying from lack of water the high flyers are in the air going to Delhi and Beijing. This was very evident on the plane where a third of the passengers who were African all oozed wealth. From nice suits, to excessive bling these passengers were obviously doing quite well for themselves. Given the state of their nation these people, and their airline are doing relatively well for themselves.
The plane was your usual sort of jumbo with overly cramped seats, microwaved food and poor inflight entertainment. It was a bit rough around the edges and evidently hadn’t been maintained too recently. For example, my meal tray sat at an unhelpful angle resulting in a slightly embarassing incident involving the reminants of my dinner ending up on my neighbours lap whilst he slept. Ahem. Similarly, the upholstory was a quite tattered and the plane’s wings had disturbing staines flaring from the joints.
Perhaps unfairly, my confidence was pre-set to its over cautious mode well before I got anywhere near the plane. Unfortuantely this wasn’t helped any when my fellow passengers and I boarded the plane. Confusion broke out shortly after we began looking for our seats in the usual cramped and crushing manner. Looking for seat 31K I was slightly concerned to discover the plane only had seats in positions I and J. As the air hostess approached I half expected to hear “sorry sir, we lost those seats in the turblance on the way in.” However, the reality was a similar confused look after which she tried to console with me by suggesting I find myself another seat as there were only “20 passengers”. Said in a confident tone I would have been tempted to believe her had there not been a planeload of eyes gazing at us following the comotion!
Perhaps it’s just a sign of the times that I live in but the most disturbing thing about the Ethiopian experience was the in-flight entertainment. It wasn’t the quality of the movie or even the fact there were only communal TV screens. The truely horrifying thing about the whole experience was that the movie we were watching was stored on a video cassette. One can only hope that the technolgy in the cockpit was slightly more advanced…
Then again, I arrived in once piece and so did my overweight (but without charge) lugguage. The food was surprisingly tasty and the air hostesses pleasingly gave me a glass of wine in addition to a cup of orange, apple juice and tea (though she did offer to mix them all together for me). Given the only alternative was Air China I suppose flying with an African airline wasn’t all that bad afterall.