In flight

No matter what time of day you are at an airport it always seems to be busy. There I was at Terminal 5 at Heathrow airport at 6 am and the place was already a hive of activity.

Which set me thinking, where are all these people going or coming from, and pick any moment in time, just how many people are in the air at any one time?

The figures for Heathrow alone are mind boggling — with getting on for 200,000 people either coming or going every day. In a full year that is something over 70 million passengers passing through the airport. And remember Heathrow, though the busiest, is just one of the airports which serve London

More facts and figures — flights to and from 180 destinations in 85 countries, and an average of 1,286 flights a day. Which all puts this business of travel into perspective.

Perhaps as I have grown older I prefer to use smaller airports; the only difficulty is that smaller regional airports do not always have flights which go to where you want them to go. And there may be the anomaly of who actually are you flying with.

A couple of years back my wife and I wanted to go to Milan for Christmas, and our local airport at Southampton was our preferred choice. Then we found the best price was offered by Air France. So Air France it was, with a change of aircraft in Paris. Nothing remarkable about that but although we were traveling on an Air France booking with An Air France ticket, not once did we travel on an Air France flight, either going or coming back.

The one thing that could be said was the Air France staff at Paris Orly airport were very helpful when we missed the connection in Paris. Even so, there are only so many times you can walk round airport shops to kill ten hours of waiting time for the next flight on to Milan.

But back to Heathrow early in the morning. At least you can be certain the coffee is freshly made. Which reminds me of early morning flights from Stansted. A devil of an airport to get to any time of the day or night. But I do recall being able to buy a pint of Grolsch at 7am. Now, that is a good start to the day!