Simon Calder: Why plane sit-ins are no joke

The man who pays his way

Passenger power sounds a fine concept. You may have a sneaking admiration for the easyJet travellers who staged a sit-in aboard a plane at Nice airport on Sunday night – economy-class heroes, standing firm against a travel industry that treats customers as cattle. But such esteem is misplaced. In the context of aviation, passenger action spells disruption at best, arrest at worst.

The basic scenario is all too familiar. Last Sunday evening, a time when flights and airports tend to get uncomfortably crowded, easyJet found itself with a problem. The plane intended to fly the new Nice-Paris route was broken.

No-frills airlines, like everyone else in the business, make their money in the summer. They keep costs down by working planes and people to the maximum. But when things go awry there is a lot less slack in the system than that enjoyed by larger, traditional airlines.

Low-cost carriers such as easyJet and Ryanair enjoy one key advantage, though, because they fly only one kind of aircraft: the Boeing 737. So flight crew can be shuffled at will. Juggling the fleet and staff are all in a day's work for the operations managers at no-frills airlines.

When the Paris aircraft went wonky, several solutions presented themselves. None of them was attractive. There were two planes-full of passengers waiting to go home – one lot to Paris, the other to Luton – and only one plane, though another was due to turn up at around midnight. Something had to give.

I have been at Nice airport on a hot summer's evening when Air France has cancelled a domestic flight. The histrionics would send the ratings of any docu-soap rocketing.

Were I asked to choose between delaying a flight to Paris or to Luton, I would choose the latter every time rather than face the fury of Parisians scorned. That was what easyJet chose, too. But the airline asked a planeload of Luton-bound passengers to unfasten their seatbelts and go back to the departure lounge purely for reasons of logistics rather than cowardice. The Paris-bound crew was running out of hours, and could not wait for the new plane to arrive. To minimise the total disruption – and the number of hotel rooms that easyJet would have to stump up for – the staff figured that the Luton plane could be "lent" to the Paris passengers, while the British contingent waited for the second aircraft to arrive.

The mistake easyJet made was to decide too late to switch the planes. Instead, only when the Luton lot were sitting comfortably did the captain begin to spell out the unhappy message that les Anglais would have to disembark and allow the French to jump the aeronautical queue. A cannier airline might have pretended that this had been the plan all along.

Any passenger would to be miffed to be asked to give up their plane for the greater good. But standing, or rather sitting, firm was a foolish strategy. "They didn't do themselves any favours, and may even have lengthened the delay," says Samantha Day of easyJet. "I hope people don't take this as an example." I hope so, too. Aboard a plane, whether on the ground or in the air, the captain's word is law. You ignore his or her instructions at your peril. Effectively, the passengers hijacked the aircraft.

As the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 11 September approaches, anyone tempted to emulate this sort of caper while aboard a US aircraft will be lucky to escape with arrest by armed police.

* The long arm of the law, in the form of the British Transport Police, came into play when I tried to travel from Gatwick airport to Waterloo in London during the morning rush hour. I bought a perfectly legal ticket, price £9, from the booking office, and boarded a train – to Horley, a mile north of the airport. At that time of day, direct trains to the capital are thin on the ground, so you have to change and wait a few minutes for a fast service to London. In theory.

"This train is FULL and STANDING", announced a sign, adding as an afterthought that it was also 40 minutes late.

With no other northbound trains on the horizon, I returned to Gatwick airport and started again. Half an hour after I had begun, I found a train going to London Bridge and squeezed aboard.

To change trains at London Bridge, I had to put the ticket into an automatic barrier. Commuters piled up behind me while I waited vainly for the ticket to reappear. By now I was running late for, as it happened, an aviation conference. Disinclined to join a long queue and pay a pound for the final mile, I just hopped on a connecting train.

At Waterloo, a platoon of police had been drafted in to assist "revenue protection inspectors" catch fare-dodgers. I was saved from helping the officers with their enquiries thanks to a cash-flow crisis at Gatwick. I had been obliged to buy the ticket with a credit card. The receipt was accepted as proof that I had bought a ticket. The motto: annoy everyone in the queue behind you by buying all your rail tickets with plastic.

Despite the best efforts of SouthCentral Trains, I was not the last to arrive at the conference. "I've just heard that Rod Eddington [chief executive of British Airways] is going to be 10 minutes late," announced Geoff Muirhead, boss of Manchester airport. "In our business, that makes him five minutes early."

* These electronic days, who needs tickets? Richard Madge of Bexhill-on-Sea, for one. For a forthcoming trip from his local station to Perpignan for four adults and four children, he has amassed a total of 56 bits of cardboard. Were he not using rail passes on both sides of the Channel, the total would be closer to 100. "There has to be an easier way," he says.

* Stephen Rockman needs a lot of tickets, too. "I'm going to be commuting between London and Tel Aviv for at least the next 12 months. This will involve at least 30 return trips. I imagined I'd be able to strike a deal with British Airways or El Al. Despite various calls to them and a number of agents, I've not been able to find anyone who will give me a deal – either a discount for the volume or a price that smoothes out the seasonal spikes. The best I have found is an El Al agent who will sell me cheap tickets up to 60 days in advance and let me cancel those that I do not need."

Mr Rockman cannot be the only person looking for a flying season-ticket. Train companies and cross-Channel ferries offer cut-price deals for frequent travellers. But airlines are unwilling to offer fly-as-much-as-you-like tickets. The Belgian airline, Sabena, tried it between London and Brussels, then went bust. Finnair offers a discount to travellers who buy a minimum of 20 journeys, but that does not help Mr Rockman.

My thought is to compare the fare starting in Israel; on some routes, it is cheaper to buy a ticket to Britain than from here. An intermediate stop at Amsterdam or Athens could bring the fare down, but will extend the journey by at least two hours each way. Any better ideas?

* Sunshine brings out the worst in people – if they happen to be motorists, or buskers. Anyone who gets stuck in an ill-tempered queue of traffic this morning will need no convincing of the former, while millions of tourists this summer will have their enjoyment of Europe's most beautiful cities shattered by tuneless renditions of "Give Peace A Chance" (if only). "Musicians" could take a lesson from Charlie, the Bin Busker of Cambridge. His renditions of popular hits are, frankly, rubbish, but no one minds because he plays from inside a litter bin. Evidently he is making a decent living, because he pauses between songs to sip at a bottle of the upmarket lager Grolsch. I didn't hang around long enough to hear his full repertoire, but I trust it includes "My Old Man's a Dustman", and something by the band Garbage, such as "Only Happy When It Rains".

travel@independent.co.uk