Happy flying...

Flying Ryanair is never going to be anyone's greatest aviation experience. Famous for more bad than good reasons, it is most known as the airline that finds ways of charging for every small thing. At one point it looked like you'd have to 'pay to pee', thankfully someone somewhere saw sense. Europe's 'favourite''low cost airline is also reported to have once treated a man suffering from a heart attack with a sandwich, and then charged him for it. This is an airline with a very bad reputation, deservedly or not.

Believe it or not, despite first appearances, this is not a blog bashing Ryanair. Before living in Morocco I had only used the airline a handful of times, and it was okay. That is apart from one ridiculous occasion where a calamity of errors made our flight from Paris Beauvais look more like a Carry On film or some silly sketch with Benny Hill music as passengers from two unexplainedly late flights comically ran from gate to gate as teasing staff pretended to commence boarding.

Living now on the outskirts of Europe we have found ourselves regular customers of this airline we said would never again use. The Beauvais experience was not limited to the Benny Hill farce and it scarred us. However, with little choice available and repeated exposure to the experience, you find that while far from perfect, if you prepare yourself for it then the Ryanair experience is everything it promises to be. Cheap, quick and no frills air travel. That is, until you fly into Morocco. This is a stand alone experience which makes all other Ryanair routes look premier class.

Having lived in Thailand for six years and travelled a great deal around Asia, I am no stranger to budget airlines and have encountered many people for whom flying is a rarity and who are nervous or a little confused as to what to do. Saying that, in all the flights I took there, I have never seen chaos descend quite like I have seen in the last two years of travel here.

By chaos, we are not just talking about the frantic pre-boarding rush for the gate when the steady trickle to the line becomes one person too many and everyone decides that it is now or never to get in the line, or the distinctively 'long-legged' striding that people use in the fruitless attempt to carry you past a few people on the tarmac in a bid to get a better seat.

This chaos begins when people start queuing up to an hour before boarding. Not that the queue perturbs those who arrive late, they just push their way unquestioned past people, using age, illness or just the inability to look up and make eye contact with all the annoyed passengers around them as an excuse.

While the 'queue' develops it becomes noticeable that nearly every family has a child. This means that as a child free traveller you are left to stand there and pray that they don't invoke the 'children first' boarding rule. If they do you might as well go and sit back down and wait for the end of the line. That hour queuing? Wasted. Have I just found a reason to have children? Not a chance. It is airport travel and the extra stress it seems to bring every parent that has cemented our resolve on maintaining our 'child-free' status.

The stress of travelling with children didn't seem to bother the parents on our last flight to Fes. They opted instead for the 'low-impact' parenting. This entailed letting their children run wild between people and go behind the departure desk and down the stairs on their own while the departure staff were desperately trying to maintain a semblance of control and work out which child belonged to whom. While dealing with this they also had to organise the first twenty people in the queue who after an hour of standing there had obviously forgotten why they are there and misplaced their boarding passes and passports.

Once on the plane the fun of getting into a seat starts. For us we have one thought in mind. Emergency Exit Seats. On our last flight, after a lot of bargaining, we were told by an Eastern European flight steward that we could sit in our desired seats as long as no one else arrived having reserved them. As he stood by us protecting the seats he got increasingly annoyed at the attempts of passengers finding seats and spaces for bags and become increasingly blunt with people. As the plane filled, greater numbers of people attempted to sit in the 'reserved' emergency seats. At first he was quite polite, telling them simply 'no, they are reserved'. As the plane got fuller it became obvious no one had reserved the seats and he needed responsible people to sit there in case of an emergency. He began to ask select people if the spoke English. Usually just receiving little more than a grunt or a blank look in response he moved them on down the plane. With some people he didn't even ask, he just looked them up and down, shook his head, muttered something under his breath and moved them on. His frustration got the better of him and by the end he was saying 'English only in these seats' in a slightly aggressive manner. This would have sounded a lot better if he had just explained that he needed English speakers to explain the exit instructions to, instead he just ended up sounding incredibly racist.

As a nervous flyer I am the first to fasten my seat belt to circulation restricting, and to turn off all electronic equipment for fear of making the plane take control of itself and steer off the runway before we even leave the ground. No such fears for these fliers, some of whom I have seen stand up and receive calls during take off and landing no matter how many times instructed otherwise. On landing women are up and in the locker before the brakes are even eased off. One friend said that on their flight last month there was even a lone child wandering up and down the aisle during landing.

To top off our last flying experience, within moments of standing up to disembark, a fight broke out within arms reach of me. This was not just a heated discussion kind of argument, but an arm swinging and shoving argument. It was between two women so there was a lot of hair pulling and face slapping as well. For some reason this made it all more unacceptable. Apparently the fight broke out as the result of one of the ladies deciding she needed to get from her seat at the front to her bag stowed at the back, right at the point everyone stood up. Shoving her way down the plane she obviously bumped into the other lady who was probably as fed up with the lack of queuing courtesy as I was, and decided she would do everything in her power to stop her. These women had to be dragged off each other and the argument continued down the length of the plane.

What a welcome back to Morocco. Nothing like a little travel stress to make you appreciate getting home. Well, inside the safety of the apartment at least.