The flight of a lifetime

A lot of your life on tour is spent at airports. A lot more of it if you happen to be in the West Indies. It's not so much that they are inefficient in the Caribbean, it's just … well, where's the hurry? If it takes 90 minutes to check in your bags, well, that's no problem, 30 minutes per customer is pretty good when you think about it. And if your flight doesn't leave for a good hour after the scheduled departure time, you can but kick back and relax, and accept that that was nothing more than a basis for negotiation anyway. As for my baggage, it hasn't yet gone missing, although I'm assured that's only a matter of time.

Having said all that, however, I don't believe I'll ever experience a flight quite like the one I took last evening. It lasted barely half an hour but it'll live with me for a lifetime. And that, I suppose, is what it's all about out here. If you take the rough with the smooth and the mundane with the extraordinary, you'll end up with an enriching experience one way or the other.

It's fair to say that my last few hours in St Kitts had been ever so slightly tedious. It's a pretty sleepy airport at the very best of times, and 8 o'clock in the evening on a Monday night certainly isn't the best of times. Everything was shut, including the brain of the girl behind the LIAT check-in desk, and despite arriving alarmingly early by my usual standards, I was soon shunted to the back of the queue when it transpired I hadn't paid my Airport Facilities Tax: US$30 for the right to perch for an hour on an unspectacular plastic seat.

By the time I had waded towards security clearance I was in danger of feeling a bit grumpy. My mood wasn't helped by the chapter I was reading in Harry Thompson's side-splitting book, Penguins Stopped Play, the tale of a village cricket team that sets out to play a match on every continent of the globe (Antarctica included). The account of the team's arrival in Barbados via Miami was laced with so many anecdotes of airport half-wittery, I was feeling rage on the author's behalf, not least when the X-Ray operator reached into my laptop bag and pulled out a forgotten can of deodorant that I'd stashed away in case of a press-box air-conditioning emergency.

"You can't take this on board," barked scanner-man, brandishing my offending can. To be honest, it was hardly my most cherished possession. The brand-name was "Hombre", I'd bought it for a pittance in the local supermarket, only to discover that the reek it omitted was every bit as bad as the reek it was intended to replace. Did I want to smell like a badger or a pimp upon arrival in Antigua? A tough choice. Either way, this latest hold-up meant I was a devout last in the boarding-of-the-plane stakes.

And that's when it hit me - this plane is rather full. I had climbed on board a bog-standard LIAT twin-prop with barely room for 70 passengers, and I was indisputably the 71st. My seat, 8C, was apologetically filled by a large Texan who clearly had little or no interest in a certain cricket match the following morning, but there seemed to be no getting out of this one. I trudged back down the steps, resigned to the fact that the World Cup airport curse had struck with a vengeance.

But then, after a hasty conference, the stewardess's voice piped up: "Would you object to travelling in the cockpit?"

Come again?

"Would you object to travelling in the …" Yes, that's what I'd thought she'd said. My inner child was doing handstands already. So up I trooped, into the cramped interior where there seemed to be no room to swing a parachute, let alone anywhere to sit. The pilots smiled benignly, as if this happened all the time, and gestured that I should unclip a fold-down bench on the wall to my right. Down it clicked, snapping into place on the floor, whereupon the stewardess appeared over my shoulder, gave me my own personal safety briefing (complete with a gesture to the escape hatch in the roof) then slammed the cabin-door shut to provide me with a back-rest. Result!

A whole new world opened up to me as we taxied out of the terminal with the twinkling lights of Basseterre swinging past the window. Flying, I can now exclusively reveal, seems to be an exercise in switch-flicking and note-taking. As air-traffic control burbled over the intercom, the first officer scribbled down co-ordinates on what appeared to be a sheet of hotel notepaper, while the pilot ran through his checks while pulling out more stops than the King's College organist.

And then we were off, launched into the ether off a deceptively short run, and blackness enveloped the cabin. The miniscule scale of St Kitts immediately became apparent from a peek through the windows, the faint blinking lights framing the tiny island in all of its distinctive bill-hooked shape. Still the switch-flicking continued though, for no sooner had we reached full height than it was time to prepare for the landing.

Antigua had been visible from the moment we completed our ascent, a bright splodge in the windscreen that grew closer and more defined with every passing minute. It was framed on either side by two more glinting jewels of the Caribbean - Barbuda to the left and Montserrat to the right, many of whose lights remained extinguished after that terrible volcanic eruption in 1995. After no more than 20 minutes, we were buzzing over St John's Harbour, then banking to the left where the landing strip of VC Bird Airport was clearly dotted out beneath us. Nothing stood out so prominently, however, than the new Sir Vivian Richards stadium to the south, whose blazing new floodlights seemed to be both the brightest and the highest point in the island.

A loud intercom warning burped out at us as the runway plummeted into view. "Three hundred!" said the automated voice as more switches were flicked and the engine noise increased to an agitated whine. "Two hundred!" as flaps were engaged and controls held steady. "One hundred!" as the end of the runway disappeared beneath the nose of the plane. "Fifty! Ten! One!" Bump. It was all over in an instant and within seconds we'd taxied to a standstill. The pilots, who had shown no interest in formality and were known merely as "William" and "Adrienne", shrugged sweetly as I extended my hand and bumbled off in bewilderment at this latest chapter of my tour.

But at the end of it all I couldn't help wondering. What on earth had they found so offensive about my can of "Hombre"? It can only have been the odour. It certainly wasn't the security risk.