Airlines could learn a lot from bus companies. Just not South African ones.

The common thread in airline stories today is, well, just what a common – as in degraded – experience air travel has become for most of the people who have to submit themselves to its dubious joys.

A constant complaint about it is how much it resembles travelling by bus. If you have any doubts about this, fly on one of the no-frills airlines like Ryanair and EasyJet who operate the quintessential flying coaches.

We resent this because flying is supposed to be glamorous. We also want cheap tickets and that’s where the worlds must, and do collide. The flying bus is the future because it’s the only way of transporting people cheaply by air.

Wave goodbye, then, to the silverware, the free dinners and the smiling hosties in the tailored uniforms. Say au revoir to legroom and to seat pitch designed for anyone bigger than a toddler.

It is a future, as Patrick Smith, the world’s best aviation columnist, points out (after a recent bus trip in Turkey), that more airlines should be striving to copy.

In a fine column on the matter of buses versus planes, Smith says: “Historically, we’ve held the airplane in haughty regard over the lowly earthbound bus, but that gap has narrowed drastically. Not because bus travel is exciting and glamorous, but because air travel has sunk to such depravity.”

Turkey, like South Africa, has a patchy rail system with relatively few passenger trains. But unlike SA, there is a bus network served by an estimated 120 000 modern, comfortable long-distance coaches.

A few years ago, Kulula.com CEO Gidon Novick said airfares on this country’s new budget airlines were reaching the point where the upstart carriers were competing with the long-distance bus companies for passengers.

Of course, since then the oil price has hiked from $30 a barrel to $145 a barrel and back to a little over half that and the fallout from the global economic atom bomb will continue to settle on our skins for years to come. The fare gap has widened again, while South Africa’s bus companies have continued to deliver the same old miserable, cramped service that they always have.

The only positive thing to be said about the long-haul buses is that they reach a few more destinations than the country’s passenger trains do – but only just. That fact is generally outweighed by the nature of South African bus journeys which tend to be at night and take a long time at it. Stuffed into an airline-style seat on a bus for 10 hours in the darkness is as unpleasant as flying long-haul on any of the world’s worst airlines.

I don’t want the airlines to emulate Turkey’s excellent and comfortable and all-reaching bus network, with its clean, roomy buses and useful schedules, I just wish the bus companies would.