Donald Clarke: I’ll fly without trousers. But don’t take my laptop

Everybody should see Alan J Pakula's 1974 thriller The Parallax View. Starring Warren Beatty as a brave investigative journalist, the film is a great expression of the era's prevailing paranoia. It also demonstrates how much air travel has changed.

About halfway through, Beatty is forced to board a particular plane on which something suspicious may be happening.

Here's what happens. Not only is he not required to show any identification, he doesn't even have to produce a ticket.

I apologise for the italics, but, to modern eyes, this is as bizarre as walking on an aeroplane brandishing a bazooka. (Something that is probably allowed in Tennessee, but that’s a subject for another time.)

Once the passengers are seated, a flight attendant wheels a cash register up the aisle and – as if on a bus – dispenses tickets with the orange juice. This is totally awesome.

Luggage swabbing

These were far from peaceful times. Indeed, plane hijacking was far more common then than it is now. But US internal flights were not seen to be at serious risk. Security tightened a little as the century ground to its close. The events of 9/11 triggered the shoe removals, luggage swabbing and fluid separation we experience today.

We endure. Something must be done. This is something. Therefore we must do this.

But the US aviation authorities are about to go too far. In March, the security wonks announced that laptops would be banned from the cabin on US flights to countries such as the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

I didn’t care much about this because I would never be on such a flight and because I’m an unbelievably self-centred person.

Last week, however, US officials confirmed that they were considering extending the ban on routes to Europe. This is now officially an outrage.

Like most travellers, I would feel more comfortable travelling without trousers than without a laptop. How am I going to play Civilization VI while pretending to myself that I am "getting a bit of work done before we land"?

Gap-toothed hillbillies

Airline travel is annoying (as I may have said a million times before in this place). Monsters recline their seats into your face without checking behind them. Gap-toothed hillbillies stand vacantly in the aisle while stowing their ugly, ugly luggage. “Friendly” people who don’t understand the rules of personal space seek to make conversation with you before the plane has even left home territory.

This new restriction on laptops is, in itself, one more addition to the aerial nightmare. What is much more significant, however, is the larger concomitant inconvenience. Anybody with a laptop will now be required to check luggage in the hold. (Sorry for more italics, but seriously?)

Over the last 10 years, I have travelled many times to the United States. I have been to Mexico. I have been to Sweden, Poland, Hungary, Finland and other equally nice bits of Europe. Every May I am lucky enough to spend 10 days at the Cannes Film Festival.

Folding underpants

At no stage have I ever checked a bag on the plane. As you read this, I will be ironing shirts and folding underpants in preparation for this year’s jaunt to the Côte d’Azur.

It requires no great skill to fit enough clean clothes for every day in an overhead bag and still leave space for toiletries, cables, notebook, two paperback novels and a bleeding laptop.

There is no risk of your bag ending up in Poznan. You can be out of the airport and at the bus stop while fellow travellers are still gawping vacantly at the carousel.

They have yet to develop opposable thumbs. I have mastered the use of tools and am on my way to developing irrigation and primitive writing. I am Homo Aeronautica.

How can I express this with out seeming demented? I could never love a person who willingly checked a bag in the hold. Will that do?

Less sophisticated

I am not suggesting that such a person must, by definition, be less moral, less sophisticated or less intelligent than the average Homo Aeronautica. But they do not see the world as we see it.

Wittgenstein famously argued that “if a lion could speak, we could not understand him”. The Austrian philosopher had nothing against lions. He just felt they experienced life very differently to human beings.

This species reads books, plays video games and goes to the opera. This species roars, prowls the Serengeti and eats antelopes. This other species checks bags, joins queues before the flight opens and stands in packs on travelling walkways.

Such divisions were less stark in the era of The Parallax View. Ah, heaven. Mind you, there actually was a bomb on the plane Beatty boarded. Do I still have a point?