The Best-Ever Flight From the Worst-Ever Airport

Business class heaven and Toronto Pearson’s vision of hell

It’s hot, and everyone keeps yelling

I’m standing in the international departures hall of Toronto Pearson airport, my head buzzing with the frantic formican activity all around me and the fractured lingering remnants of one of the worst illnesses of my life.

I spent the previous day drifting in and out of consciousness, splashed out on the sofa in the basement, my mind wandering the strange paths of sickness that stitch together past and present, real and unreal, all of it fueled by rancid cough syrup and wasabi-flavored peas.

Modern air travel isn’t supposed to be fun. It’s supposed to punish you for having the temerity to travel at all.

What, one country isn’t good enough for you? Who do you think you are?

It isn’t like I didn’t know. Three weeks earlier, we had arrived at the same sprawling airport, a suppurating sore in the already unlovely overpriced swamp that is Canada’s biggest city. For millions of people every year, this is their first glimpse of Canada, and it’s a wonder they don’t turn around en masse and get right back on the next plane leaving.

The lines. The clueless and humorless security staff. The wild prices. The endless waiting.

You know as well as I do everything that’s terrible about flying these days. You know what they put us through. As if the ongoing low-level insult of being treated somewhere between criminals and cattle is the whole point.

Get used to being dehumanized, ordered around, regarded with suspicion, treated with hostility. This, citizen, is what you were born for.

When running a business, there are a couple of different ways you can go. One is to make a premium product for the select few. Sell a high-end experience to the few customers with the sophistication to appreciate what you’re doing.

That, in my own way, is what I’m doing here. This is not going to be a guide to the best shops and restaurants in the ghastly antihuman edifice of Toronto Airport. I’m not after your wallet; I’m after your heart.

Then there’s the other way to go. Volume. Make it fast, sell it cheap, and move on to the next sucker. It’s a strategy that mimics the approach of sea creatures like turtles and octopuses, along with parasites like fleas and ticks. The vast majority of the babies will die, but that doesn’t matter if you have enough of them. Most of your customers may hate you, but that doesn’t matter when you can always find more.

Reproductively, humans are the opposite. We have our children mostly one at a time and invest incredible resources into ensuring their survival.

The inevitable conclusion is that airlines are run by parasites.

Why not buy your way out?

Whether I can be considered rich or not depends on your politics and your standards. Lots of you have far more money and assets than I do.

Then again, lots of you probably don’t. To most people in the world, I live like some demented sultan rotten with wealth, cackling as clean fresh water pours straight from the tap down my throat.

I can afford €400.

And that was the difference in ticket price between an economy flight in cattle-car class, knees around your ears, the back of your seat pummeled by the world’s strongest toddlers, and the undreamed-of luxury of business class.

I’ve never flown anything but economy before. Then again, I’m older than I used to be. Comfort means more to me than it used to.

Airlines have people — or, more likely, algorithms — to figure this stuff out. It’s not a mistake that a business class flight from Barcelona, the closest major airport to where I live in the south of France, to Toronto, is a fraction of the price of one from somewhere like Paris or London to the same city.

I don’t need to know why.

And given that airlines now love to charge for things like seat selection and every bag you bring, but include all that in business class, the difference in price starts to become insignificant.

We flew to Canada in our normal economy section. But the flight back, the redeye that would see us landing in Barcelona at 10AM, was business class. Maybe I could even sleep on a plane for the first time ever, ensconced in my lie-flat bed.

For once, I was actually looking forward to a flight.

That was before I got The Sickness.

It’s possible that Toronto Pearson is not the worst airport in the world

I’m ready to admit that. I’ve never been to Lisbon, for example, or Kathmandu.

Still, I’ve seen my share of terminals. I can’t count the times I’ve navigated Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and Luton. I’m an old hand at Paris Charles de Gaulle, and an expert on both of Rome’s airports. I’ve flown into and out of Naples, where the staff didn’t ask a single question about the Bitcoin mining rig in my bag that could only look more like a bomb if I had taped an alarm clock to it.

Every one of them stands like a shining vision of paradise compared to the pit of despair that is Toronto Pearson.

Maybe it’s not the worst place in the world. But it can’t be more than a short ride on a smelly and overheated shuttle bus away.

It starts quickly.

After check-in, we made our way to security. Business-class aristocrats get their own line for security.

But first, you have to scan your passport. After all, why have a human do something when you could have a machine do it less efficiently, less effectively, and more expensively?

My wife went first. She scanned her passport, the little gate opened, and she passed through. I waited patiently for the gate to close. It didn’t.

“Step off the pad!” a member of staff yelled at me.

They only yell at Pearson. Every staff member has been trained to bellow anything they say. They are commanded not to smile on pain of dismissal, and never use a polite word when an insult will do.

I stepped off the black rubber mat in front of the gate.

“Step off the pad! Step off the pad! You have to step off the pad!”

“Yeah, I got it,” I yelled back, the fevered blood curdling in my veins. Remember when Canadians used to pretend to be nice?

So much for the aristocracy. The business class line leads you to the same security bottleneck everyone else has to use. There, a man whose entire job consists of screaming at passengers stood behind the conveyor belt, roaring.

“Put your bags in a tray! Take your laptops out!”

I glanced under the conveyor belt to the mechanism that’s supposed to automatically return the plastic trays. Nothing.

“There are no trays.”

“Everything has to go in a tray!”

“There are no trays!”

With an insulted air, he squinted under the belt to see the godless desert where the trays should be.

“Oh,” he said.

Then, turning away from us, he began yelling at the growing line behind us.

“Put your bags in a tray!”

He’s still yelling it now. I can hear him. In some Nietzschean eternal recurrence, he’s chained for eternity to his conveyor belt, screaming about trays that don’t exist.

Navigating the airport

Our business class tickets also granted us entrance to the Air Canada Signature lounge. Away from the chaos of the departure gates, it’s an oasis of calm.

There’s a free tasting menu. There are bottomless cocktails, and, sick or not, I treated myself to a few Old Fashioneds. It’s all low lighting and soft music and comfy chairs, a place to store your bags, a place to charge your phone, and a truly gorgeous bathroom with actual fabric towels.

You want to stay there forever. You can’t. Eventually, you have to board your plane, and that means heading down into the madness again.

In keeping with Canadian custom, Toronto does not miss a single opportunity to bilk you out of some more money on your way out the door.

As you head to the international departure gates, you pass through a giant steel vagina that distorts your voice as you complain — because by now, you will be complaining — and find yourself in a kind of gauche shopping mall designed for the international rich.

It’s all Prada and Hermes and Bulgari, vast and almost completely empty warehouses for glitzy garbage where bored staff wait on floors polished to a mirrorlike shine for customers that never arrive.

People waiting for a plane aren’t spending, so the airport has replaced all seating with restaurants. There is literally nowhere to sit without an iPad flashing a menu in front of you, pressuring you to spend some more.

Between the restaurants and the windows of the empty stores, there’s a narrow corridor for people to get from one gate to another. Inevitably, that’s where people end up sitting, until it becomes impossible to get anywhere without tripping over bags and kids and exhausted travelers who have the stunned look of people financially ruined by a trip they wish they hadn’t taken.

Even we aristocrats can’t avoid the chaos. Still, we get our own special line. Unfortunately, it’s full of the kind of people who fly business class.

“Oh yeah, Bologna?” screams a tall man behind me to the friend right next to him. So loud, in fact, that for a moment, I thought he worked at the airport.

“Is that in the north or the south? Yeah, I thought so. We did, like, the whole north of Italy last year.”

A nation with thousands of years of history, art, and culture is apparently something you ‘do’. Once.

Of course, we aristocrats get on the plane first. Dare to stop for a moment to get something out of a bag, and your fellow aristocrats push right past you. Here, there is no please, no thank you. Just losers in crisp baseball caps and heavy gold chains, bragging about their vacations while they max out Daddy’s air miles.

And when you board the plane and turn left, you can feel their seething resentment that I, with my Primark suitcase, am sitting closer to the cockpit than they are.

Pod people

Air Canada’s international business class cabin consists of rows of four giant pods. Two in the middle with a discreet little barrier between, and one on each side next to the window.

It’s your own little world up there. A comfy seat that’s infinitely adjustable, a big TV in front of you, and a little toiletry set tucked into the tiny cupboard where you can keep everything you need for the flight. You barely get your seatbelt on before you’re offered champagne and a hot towel.

It feels like there are more flight attendants in a cabin of sixteen aristocrats like us than there are for the great unwashed dregs slowly struggling onto the plane behind us.

After the nightmare of the worst airport I’ve ever been to, anything would have been a relief. But this isolated pod was pure perfection.

I had planned to try all the food, all the drink, to soak up everything the experience had to offer. But with The Sickness burning inside me, I didn’t do any of that.

Instead, I reclined the seat all the way back until it became a bed, changed the screen in front of me to display Do Not Disturb, and slept like the aristocrat I am, all the way to Barcelona.

Bliss.

Then again, there’s no bad way to leave Toronto.