Bad weather? Turbulence? In Flight emergency? Pah! They are nothing. You want a really bad sector? Then try stepping onboard an aircraft full of so called football fans!
My worst sector ever was a relatively short hop from MAN-LGW. We were positioning crew, following a long haul flight into MAN and England had been playing, but if memory serves me correctly, had lost or drawn the match. However, due to some other team losing, England had made it to the World Cup or European Cup or whatever other cup was in question that year. The crew, it pains me to say, were woefully ineffective and the flight was carnage. Singing through the demo, abuse to the crew serving drinks and the underlying tension that always seems to be present whenever football fans get together. Sure enough, shortly before landing, a fight broke out amongst the passengers sat by the overwing exits. The crew did nothing, preferring to hide in the galley. I have never, in my life, wanted off an aircraft more desperately than I did that day. No one was there to meet the aircraft and the imbeciles carried on through arrivals and were last seen kicking eight bells out of each other in the road outside the North Terminal.
I now work for that same airline and am the one that has to contend with those football fans. I still dread those flights, to this day and follow the football calendars, solely in an attempt to avoid the flights. Club fans are usually not too bad. Once they've been given the facts of life on the jetty before I let em on, they'll usually keep a lid on it, although, for some reason, certain Rangers fans still occasionally need a clip round the ear to remind them of their responsibilities. The really big dread is reserved for when England or Scotland are playing and the rival factions come together. All those flights have one similarity. That same underlying tension. The knowledge that you are operating on a knife edge and that violence is just one wrong look, or one wrong word, away.
And it's all, supposedly, about a damned game!
Jsl
P.S. Erm..sorry...got a bit carried away!
