How can I make sure I avoid the Boeing 737 Max?

Simon Calder answers your questions on flight safety, Christmas trips and his travel highlights

It will be a long time before the model is back in the air (Getty)

Q I want to fly to Oslo in April 2020, but I don’t want to fly on a Boeing 737 Max. I called Norwegian and explained all that. It said it no longer flies Max aircraft, and that it would be a Dreamliner. Is it giving the Maxes back to Boeing? I have read they will be flown at the beginning of March 2020. Confused!

Ian M

A The sacking just before Christmas of the boss of Boeing, Dennis Muilenburg, has placed renewed attention on the 737 Max – the aircraft involved in two fatal crashes that claimed a total of 346 lives.

Norwegian was a leading operator of the Boeing 737 Max until the plane was grounded worldwide in March 2019, after the second crash. It is very likely the Max will be flying again for Norwegian when the necessary changes have been made and it is cleared for commercial service once again.

However, the chance of this happening by April looks extremely remote. The first stage of rehabilitation is for the Federal Aviation Administration to approve Boeing’s changes to the software on the Max that was implicated in the two fatal accidents – crucially, ensuring that if something goes wrong with the software or the data that drives it, the pilots will be able to overrule the system. Then other regulators have to be convinced, and pilots will have to be trained on the latest version of the flight control system.

Suppose that happens by February 2020. The Max aircraft that are in storage will require large-scale maintenance before they are able to fly. So I estimate that the prospect of any of Norwegian’s 737s flying before May 2020 are remote, and I would book with confidence.

Don’t expect, though, to be aboard a Boeing 787 Dreamliner. These aircraft are used almost exclusively for long-haul flights, and Norwegian has several out of service because of problems with their Rolls-Royce engines. Your aircraft will almost certainly be a 737-700 or -800, the last generation of the popular twin jet – confusingly called the Next Generation or NG.

Long-haul hubs, such as Amsterdam, are the easiest places to get to over the festive break (Getty/iStock)

Q I have read your advice to travel on Christmas Day to long-haul destinations – you said it was cheaper and more pleasant. But why are there hardly any European flights from the UK on 25 December?

Emma B

A Christmas Day is certainly the optimum day of the festive season for travelling long-haul. Air fares tend to be substantially lower, airports are far less crowded and some planes even have a few empty seats, making for a more comfortable journey. I have flown from the UK to Cape Town and Buenos Aires on 25 December, both of them excellent journeys.

Historically, the only Christmas Day short-haul flights are feeders to long-haul destinations. British Airways has a couple of Manchester-Heathrow flights for this purpose, as well as some other European links to fill up its long-haul services. Conversely, Air France, KLM, Lufthansa and other airlines have services from their hubs to a range of UK airports. But travelling to somewhere other than Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt has proved difficult. Ryanair and easyJet continue to provide their staff with a guaranteed day off on 25 December.

But this Christmas more short-haul flights than ever operated from the UK. The real star from the east was Wizz Air, which ran a near-normal service to and from Luton airport to destinations across eastern Europe – at good fares, too. On either of the two evening flights to Budapest, the fare was just £63, booking a day ahead.

Other non-UK airports chipped in, with Eurowings from Heathrow to Cologne the cheapest deal on offer (booking 24 December) at just £40 one way. And while British Airways closed its base at Gatwick for the day, Vueling, BA’s sister carrier, kept things running with flights from the Sussex airport to Rome and Florence, among others.

These and other airlines will be studying the appetite for Christmas Day flying, and schedules may well expand further next year. But a big limiting factor is that so much public transport closes down in the UK on 25 December, making airport access difficult for many would-be travellers.

The Eurostar Ski Train runs at the weekend from mid-Christmas to April (Getty)

Q What are my rights if the Eurostar Ski Train times are changed because of the strike in France and we have to travel during the day and pay for an extra night’s accommodation in the Alps?

Alison T

A Eurostar and its passengers are having a horrible December. Through no fault of their own, they are caught up in the nationwide general strike that is paralysing the rail network in France. Since the protest against pension reforms began on 5 December, more than 100 trains have been cancelled – mostly between London and Paris, but also some to and from Amsterdam and Brussels.

The Ski Train that runs at weekend from mid-Christmas to April comprises a very popular part of the Eurostar offering – especially the Friday night service, which departs St Pancras at a civilised 7.45pm and arrives in the French Alps in time for breakfast and a day on the slopes.

Unfortunately the strike by signallers working for SNCF (French Railways) means that the critical train paths are unavailable. Rather than cancelling what is a very lucrative and necessary service, Eurostar has to take whatever line options it can.

For the first departure just before Christmas, the train operator solved the problem by delaying the overnight train by 11 hours so it became an early morning train on Saturday, with the skiers arriving just in time for dinner, not breakfast.

For the second, which is tomorrow, Eurostar has decided that Friday lunchtime is the best it can do – judging that few customers will need to be at work. The train arrives on Friday night, whereupon everyone will need somewhere to stay. Because this is rail, not air, the train firm is not obliged to provide accommodation when it changes the schedule. But recognising that hotels are at a premium in resorts such as Meribel and Les Arcs, Eurostar is building in an extra stop in the town of Albertville, where there may be more availability and prices will certainly be lower.

You can, if you wish, claim a full refund – though not on the accommodation for which you will probably have pre-paid. But I bet you will choose to continue.

In a haze: Simon had an I was there moment seeing Jimi Hendrix during his performance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 (Getty)

Q It was your birthday this week. What are the most memorable travelling highlights of your life so far? One per decade, please.

Charlotte H

A Being born in a semi-detached beside the A23 in Crawley on 25 December 1955 was not exactly a travel highlight, but in retrospect it set a promising course. Our house on London Road was barely a mile south of Gatwick airport, where I later worked in a series of jobs, and 100 yards away from what I discovered to be one of the most hitchable roundabouts in Sussex.

No question about the Sixties highlight, which had a prelude. In 1961, my parents had taken my siblings and me to the flimsy perimeter fence of Gatwick airport to watch Air Force One land at Gatwick with President John F Kennedy aboard. But by October 1962 JFK and his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev, were about to come to nuclear blows over the warheads en route to the Caribbean, with Gatwick airport a likely target. I was too young to shudder at the prospect of imminent Armageddon on the Sussex-Surrey border but old enough to know that the Cuban missile crisis had propelled mum and dad to fly us as far from the inevitable target as they could afford. Guernsey, as it turned out. Or heaven.

On the eve of the Seventies, man landed on the moon and I landed in France – on a school day trip to Dieppe, my first trip abroad, in July 1969. But a journey the following year to the Isle of Wight was even more exotic. I was one of half-a-million people at the greatest show on Earth when Jimi Hendrix played at the festival in August 1970.

All along, the watchtowers made the Berlin Wall seemed permanently impenetrable. In the bitter January of 1989 I was fortunate to cross Checkpoint Charlie. By the end of that momentous year, so had everyone.

In the Nineties, too, I saved the best for the last year of the decade: hitching and flagging down buses for the length of the Pan-American Highway, from Texas to Panama, in December 1999. My wife and I spent Christmas night at the wonderful Esquinas Rainforest Lodge in the southernmost fragment of Costa Rica.

The first decade of the 21st century was almost at an end when I boarded a British Airways 747 to Cairo after the BA cabin crew strike was called off at the last minute. Even from the upper floor of the Giza branch of Pizza Hut (yes, I know, but my family was young at the time), the Sphinx and the pyramids filled the horizon with antiquity. And in Luxor, the Valley of the Kings provided a glorious highway to the past.

The 2010s are not quite over yet. But I am fairly sure that the decade’s travel highlight will prove to be the surprising feeling, in January 2014, of reaching the top of the highest mountain outside the Himalayas. The summit of Aconcagua in Argentina is 22,837ft above sea level, and quite a long way from Crawley.

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