Everyone knows how much fun flying is these days. The sense of adventure, the exhilaration of the open skies…The queues, the endless waiting around, the stress, the cattle market vibe. Once upon a time, so we are told, flying was glamorous. Now it’s about as glamorous as catching the tube.Unless you fly to Caen or Deauville from Brighton Airport, with Sky South, a tiny airline whose website does not hint at the joys that are in store.
Brighton airport is a one hour train journey from Victoria station, followed by a five minute taxi ride through the backroads of Shoreham-by-Sea. When the cab driver in this sleepy town undercharges you, something suggests this will be no normal flight and that feeling escalates at the airport, a cream coloured art deco masterpiece, complete with swinging mahogany doors. Beyond which is the information desk staffed by two women with neither uniforms nor any sense of urgency. Tentatively I asked about check-in. You’re a bit early, one of them said. Why don’t you go and get a cup of tea and come back in an hour?
The website had claimed you only needed to check-in half an hour before the flight . A seasoned traveller in a world of security and terrorist scares, I knew this couldn’t possibly be right. I’d arrived with a conservative hour and three quarters to spare.
Plenty of time to savour a Panini and a pot of tea from the art deco restaurant, whose windows are embossed with frosted bi-planes. A pilot and his co-pilot were sitting on the table next to me. One of them said, with a chortle: ‘Even with the lever pulled back?’. I wasn’t sure if this was reassuring or terrifying. They were about to fly to Chester. Surely only trains go to Chester?
Confirming that this really was an airport, dozens of tiny two-seater airplanes were tootlling along the runway in the shadow of green fields and Lancing College. Occasionally a brightly coloured helicopter had a go at taking off. It looked like the insect room of London zoo.
After an hour of observing the wildlife, I went to discover if my flight really existed. I was allowed to check in, at the grandly named Terminal 3 (I have no idea where the other Terminals are hidden), all of a minute’s walk away. My bag was taken and I was told to go and have another cup of tea, and someone would come and get me just before the flight.
As good as their word I was summoned five minutes before departure and ushered through security along with the four other passengers. The plane looked small on the outside and even smaller on the inside. The other four got on first and I took seat number 5 out of 8.
In normal flying terms, there are the big planes that skip oceans and the smaller, low-budget variety which are cramped and uncomfortable. The plane to Deauville was of another order altogether. It had one seat to an aisle and four aisles. Though to call them aisles is an exaggeration. More a gap to allow the pilot to get to his seat. The machine was a tin can with wings attached, its flimsiness compounded by the safety talk when the pilot explained how, as the last man at the rear of the plane, I’d have to push a black button and then pull a lever in event of emergency, but my best bet would be to push the window in and climb onto the wing. Having said which he ducked down and clambered into his seat.
Minor celebrities sometimes boast of how they’re invited into the cockpit to spend the flight with the pilot. On the Brighton-Deauville run, everyone’s a minor celebrity. As the plane gathered speed on the runway, progress was visibly un-straightforward. It veered in a wobbly line, before hopping into the air, and, somewhat surprisingly, climbing in a vertical direction. Hair raising, natch, but also, as opposed to the mundanity of regular flying, exhilarating.
The plane banked over Brighton and its piers, before heading over the Channel. Half way across we were enveloped by clouds, moving from panoramic vista to pea souper in seconds. The instruments in the cockpit gleamed reassuringly, though I had no idea what any of them meant. The mighty sky beyond roared all around us.
The clouds cleared and we flew down the French coast for ten minutes, over Le Havre and the mouth of the Seine, landing in the desolate solitude of Deauville airport. It doesn’t seem right to call an airport picturesque, but Deauville, hewn from brooding forest, is. Save for a metallic Lear jet that vamooshed the moment we arrived, there were no other planes in sight. Clearing customs took all of two minutes. I was out of the airport within five minutes of landing.
On the return journey I arrived with forty five minutes to spare. Five members of staff catered for two passengers. The airport’s framed autograph book showed compliments from Harrison Ford, Mick Jagger, George Bush snr and Henry Kissinger. The return journey was in a more luxurious plane, with plush leather seats. My fellow passenger knew all about flying (claiming to possess an old German bomber that used twelve tons of fuel per minute parked at Bournemouth) and said we were ok as long as the de-icers worked. As the plane descended towards Brighton, the whole of the South Coast from the Isle of White to the Cliffs of Dover rose out of the earth to greet us, resplendent in morning sunshine.
If you own a private jet you can get this kind of experience whenever you fly. But for those of us who’ve heard tales of the glamour of aviation but never witnessed it, a trip to Deauville summons up an era when the skies were still a wonder to be explored, not a mere means to an end.
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