Three cheers for airliner captains and crew

What a change flying's made to our lives. I used to travel quite often by sea between UK and Cape Town and the fastest time was around two months, and it was about the same whether heading northward or dashing south.

I was delivering yachts in either direction on those journeys. 
The memory of the voyages makes getting from one place to the other now seem astonishingly, almost impossibly, quick.

These days the well-heeled can clamber onto a British Airways flight at Heathrow and be admiring Table Mountain in just 11 and half hours.

Cockpit chats

To do the journey more economically, you can travel via Turkey or Arabia.

It takes quite a lot longer, but you're still almost certain to get there within about 20 hours.

The longer journey will be the cheaper one, assuming you have shopped around, of course. 

On longer flights back then, life up at 35,000 feet was very different. No problem to visit the cockpit to chat with the captain.

 Now even the Queen might struggle to be admitted.

Of course, terrorism wasn't so fashionable in the days I refer to, and thankfully we seemed free then of travel's horror stories – Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that disappeared in 2014, and the German Airlines flight that seemed a horrible case of suicide.

 Applause for the captain

A change I do regret is an old flying tradition in Africa that's been lost in time. 
Back in the eighties and early nineties, South African passengers on landing would applaud the clever experts in the cockpit, just as enthusiastically as an appreciative audience after a concert performance.

Sadly, the international norm – silence - is the case in SA now. A plane lands at Cape Town or Johannesburg or Durban, and passengers seem interested only in getting off. A salute to professional skill is forgotten.

I wonder why. I put the thought to a handsome authority in the family who might know - a nephew who is a very experienced captain for Air New Zealand. I emailed Aaron Rodgers, in Auckland. I asked, Do pilots hear applause these days? … Continues on the blogs for my ocean sailing adventure book, Sailing to Purgatory, at SailingToPurgatory.com