Cricklewood Airlines

Following the resounding success of the Gladstonbury Festival and the completion of resurfacing on the Broadway, Cricklewood's reputation is increasingly outstripping that of London generally. Add to that the imminent commencement of the £2.8bn redevelopment of the town centre by Multiplex and the new Wembley Stadium just around the corner and it seems obvious that it will be only a matter of time before the commencement of direct air services to Cricklewood.

Faced with the prospect, one resident of Cricklewood had this to say on the topic of airline toilets:

Like every young boy, I grew up in awe of aircraft: the monstrous jet engines; the sleek lines of a fighter; the slow rise of a lumbering jumbo. The incredible fact that a seventy metre long metal boat that flies through the air with 432 people inside can actually be a fast and efficient way of getting around. Then, when you get over the fact that these extraordinary machines are powered by the same two turbines that you find just four of inside really big power stations, you start to get captivated by all the other airline amazement.

Nowadays, you can dial anywhere in the world, even from economy. You can send SMS messages from your seat. You can watch any of fifteen movies on your personal screen, play games and listen to 12 channels of music. I understand, from those in the know, that the kitchens are pretty swish now. They have some kind of gourmet chef for first class and, sure, the food in economy is pretty cheaply done but it’s still a fair sort of spread for something that’s been prepared on a big bus. Then there’s the safety technology, the autopilot, the GPS, the whole box and dice. You can pretty much have the Captain swap seats with that screaming baby from 47G and things should run along pretty smoothly nonetheless.

Of course, some things haven’t come so far. Like the Rock of Gibraltar, these things stand firm against the tide of progress and the thrashing waves of downright cleverness.

The first of these is the so called “on-board safety procedure”. Has this changed at all in the last twenty years? If you do end up in the sea, the basic drill is the same as it was in my grandfather’s day: bung on an inflatable lifejacket, toot your little plastic whistle (in the hope that the passing oil tanker ten miles away will be observing a moment’s silence) and flash your little light.

The rubber slides have, according to the safety message, still not been upgraded to the point where they can take a well-aimed knock from a high-heeled shoe and I’m guessing that the life rafts are not too different from those used in World War Two.

Of course, this is all perfectly understandable. You can have all the slides and lifejackets and whistles and lights that you like but if that big Boeing is going for a swim, you’re pretty much dead already and there’s no point pretending otherwise. So, with an eye to cost and practicality, technological development funding would seem not to have been centred on these little items. This I understand. I do not object to it.

However, I have a significant issue with the single most underdeveloped area of every aircraft ever put into commercial passenger service – the lavatory. No, I don’t mind that I have to wait for forty minutes to get in. Space is, after all, at a premium up there. Customers, after all, often drink too much. Fine. But, for heaven’s sake, look at the horrible things when you do make it inside! Inch for inch, from the plastic moulding to the stainless steel flapping bowl to the taps that only wash one hand at a time, these things are the exact same ugly product that has been in the air since Wilbur and Orville Wright’s bladders started to weaken.

Why are they still so awful? Perhaps it was Bill Boeing’s pet project, of which he was so proud that, on his deathbed, he decreed that it never be changed. If so, I’d like to know. We could all pay our respects and feel good about the beige sixties feel, the industrial vacuum cleaner toilets and the slip lock doors that all seem here to stay. Perhaps it was avant garde in his time. Sadly for we air travellers, I suspect I am romanticising this and I believe there is a simpler explanation.

What happened, I believe, is that there was a time, many aeons ago, when passenger aircraft were just about to become capable of long flights – flights so long, in fact, that we couldn’t really be expected to hold on until the next airfield. Boeing had a staff meeting at which the task of designing the loo was allocated to a young engineer whom I shall call Eric. Eric, not entirely happy with his lot, announced that he was off down the pub, where he complained long and hard to a bored barmaid whom I shall call Florrie. The next morning, Eric returned with some beer soaked sketches which we now understand to have been heavily influenced by three things: firstly, the stainless steel of the beer taps; secondly, the blondness of Florrie’s hair; and, thirdly, his own penchant for rendered plastic moulding. And then, as an afterthought, he put the little flower holder in because Florrie happened to mention that she liked flowers.

This, sadly, was pretty much it for aircraft toilet design. Boeing, after all, employ the best of the dreamers, the technicians, the speed kings, the romantics. They are simply not an organisation that employs toilet designers. Even Eric himself went back to his true passion of perfecting the little motors that move the flaps in the wings. Indeed, from that moment on, whenever the topic of the toilets is raised in the weekly management meetings, it is quite quickly glossed over – much as you might gloss over a tasteless joke in distinguished company.

In the deep deep recesses of the pits of their stomachs, I think the good people of Boeing know that there is a major project looming here, that something really ought to be done. They know – but can we really blame this fine organisation for hesitating? Their people have worked and studied hard to get where they are. They have outshone their peers and dazzled their teachers. Who can blame the manager who hesitates to crush young professionals of such pedigree with those cruel words, “Tony, you’ll be spending the next two years making the lavs look better.”