Airline travel, again
This year I flew to Las Vegas for EMC World 2014. Same as last year. The trip was less gruesome, as we had only one layover in Heathrow, both ways. The trip still takes nearly a day, including time spent waiting at airports, sitting in cabs etc. Not something I’d like to do multiple times a year.
Anyways. Travel. In Finland, things were as “easy” as they have been. No hassles at security. When you leave, you step into this booth (self service), get your picture taken and stored (for..some amount of time?). When you come back, the same process is repeated. I suppose they can track people and say “this person left, and came back”. Plus they have images of the people who are not in the country, and who are in the country. Handy if you need to track someone down.
At London Heathrow, there was a small kind of security screening thing. Get you and your bags scanned, again, and your passport looked at. Nothing too intensive.
The flight to vegas and back was on a British Airways 747-400. Personal entertainment system at each seat. Complementary crappy headphones, but on the other hand, they have used standard 3.5mm stereo plugs, so you can use your own headphones. Which is a nice change from the weird two-pronged airline fuckeries, deployed by most airlines. But, BA has no inflight internet. Blows. 10.5 hours between London and Las Vegas means.. well, being offline these days, even in the air, is a pain. Granted, you can use more gadgets in-flight than you previously could. Most devices can be on even during take off, but for some reason, phones can’t. Even if they are in airplane mode. Airplane mode means: no signals going in or out. Other than EM field generated by the various components of the device itself. But then, why would an e-book reader be any different? It has an airplane mode, and some of them even have 3G functionality, making them essentially big phones. So why can they stay on during the entire flight, including take off and landing? Mysterious.
Security at Las Vegas was about the same as usual. We were the only flight in at that time, so we only waited for about.. 15 minutes going through immigrations. Not a whole lot of questions this time around.
CBP person – “So, why are you here?”
Me: “A conference”
CBP person – “What conference?”
Me: “EMC World, at the Venetian”
CBP person – “Welcome to the United States”
That was about the extent of our conversation. Fastest entry of any of my trips to the States.
What eats me alive is that stupid “Welcome to America!”-video that plays, apparently, at all airfields when you are waiting in line for the Customs and Border Protection.
Leaving Las Vegas, there were people who were put through the Rapiscan thing (nudie-scanner), and some, like me, who were put through a standard metal detector. There was a lady in the line next to me who opted out of the rapiscan, and that wasn’t an issue for the TSA guys. No hassle, as far as I could tell.
Not once were any of my bags opened, and I wasn’t subject to any intense scruitny or questioning. Then again, why should I? I’ve never been selected for ‘random screening’, where as I have heard that some people are almost always subjected to the completely unbiased non-discriminatory ‘random screening’. I guess I’m just lucky.
Then again, few countries have any issues with Finland or Finnish people. We’re not a threat to anyone, and we’re not interesting to most people. Most don’t even know where we are. That makes it pretty easy for us to get around the world.
That is, except for airline personel. We actually managed to drink all the gin that was on that plane (though, I do believe first- and business class has their own stash). Note, it’s a British airline, so they are bound to have a metric (or imperial?) fuckton of gin onboard. But when you get a group of Finns, that order not one, or two, but three drinks every time that unlucky flight attendant passes us..
At one point the stewardess that mostly took care of our piece of the plane started to suggest that some in our party maybe order one drink at a time, instead of two or three. And when we were above the continental US, she started pretty much ignoring some people in our group. “Hey xxxxx!” (they started calling her by name), and she’d be all like “Just a moment!”, and then never coming back. I hate traveling with that certain type of Finnish people, who need four galons of beer and booze to survive a flight. Not saying we’re all like that! Just 98% of us…