When the world’s most frequent flyer offers to share some travelling tips, best listen. Turn off that 15-inch HDTV, elevate your fully flat bed with its crisp white cotton duvet, call for another glass and pay attention to the man. Because Tom Stuker – veteran of more than 10,000 flights and 21 million air miles, the equivalent of circling the equator nearly 844 times – knows more about the good life at 35,000 feet than anyone alive.
In the world of executive-club air travel, Tom Stuker is Elvis Presley – the ne plus ultra, the beginning and the end, the frequent flyer against whom every elite business traveller must measure his own air miles.
The 65-year-old from Nutley, New Jersey – cofounder of Automotive Training Network, a car sales consultancy – is in the air from 200 to 250 days a year. Stuker’s airline of choice – United Airlines – loves him so much that it throws parties in his honour: it had two shindigs to celebrate him reaching 20m air miles, one above the clouds and the other on the ground. Now semiretired, Stuker’s air miles are going up faster than ever. Because he loves nothing more than flying away. And he knows how you can love it too.
Stuker suggests you get yourself into a monogamous relationship with just one airline. He has been with United Airlines’ Mileage Plus loyalty programme since 1983. Those 21m air miles have all been racked up with United.
Stuker’s flying tips encourage common courtesy to staff and fellow travellers. Others are counterintuitive – forget all that stuff about getting on local time when you land. He always takes a three-hour nap upon arrival (long haul is Tom’s natural habitat – he has made 350 trips from the US to Australia and 100 from the States to London). Some tips are obvious, such as fly in the best cabin you can afford or can get someone else to pay for.
Truly, flying first class is the heroin of travel.
Growing up in a working-class family in New Jersey, Stuker was one of seven children and did not fly at all as a boy. As a young man, he slowly advanced from “coach” – the hideous American euphemism for cattle class – to the front of the aircraft, admitting he could never have notched up 21m miles if he had been forced to do it in economy: “I’d be hospitalised right now.”
But Stuker’s greatest tip remains unspoken. And it is that even in our flight-shaming age of drone-buzzing eco-warriors, post-9/11 security checks and striking pilots, flying is fun. It is one of life’s great joys. Flying is romantic, glamorous, one of the best things about this short, sweet trip. Flying is not some heavy burden that a man must bear, but an escape from all mundane cares. To be in a good seat on a long-haul flight as you skip from one side of the planet to the other is to remove yourself – physically, mentally, spiritually – from the domestic, the humdrum, the daily grind. Flying is transcendent, meditative bliss.
“The clouds usher in tranquillity,” writes Alain de Botton in The Art Of Travel. “Below us are enemies and colleagues, the sites of our terrors and our griefs; all of them now infinitesimal, scratches on the earth.”
In the digital claustrophobia of modern life, to be above the clouds in a good seat is to experience what it is like to be gloriously alone.
“A jet is detached, physically remote and separate for a certain number of miles and hours,” wrote Mark Vanhoenacker in his classic memoir, Skyfaring: A Journey With A Pilot. “Such solitude is all but absent from the world now. So high above the world, open to more of the planet and the sky than any species has the right to see, we find room for introspection in one of the last places we might have thought to look for it.”
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Flying is, in fact, far more than fun. It’s addictive. “The miles are the goal,” says George Clooney’s corporate “downsizer” (he sacks people) in Up In The Air, Jason Reitman’s love letter to executive air travel. “I have a number in mind and I haven’t hit it yet.” The number Clooney’s character, Ryan Bingham, has in mind is 10m air miles. “I would be the seventh person to do it,” he sighs. “More people have walked on the moon.”
In the normal Hollywood scheme of things, Bingham would come to see the error of his ways and learn to love, connect to other humans and all that jazz. But as he flies off into the sunset at the end of Up In The Air, Clooney’s voice-over is unrepentant about being obsessed with those sexy air miles.
“Tonight, most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids,” he reflects. “They’ll sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights – slightly brighter than the rest – will be my wing tip, passing over.”
Some will see the likes of Stuker and Bingham as killers of our planet, selfishly unconcerned about climate change, global warming and carbon footprints. Stuker insists his conscience is clean.
“I’m not adding to the footprint,” he says. “The plane is going to fly whether I’m on it or not. It would be much more relevant if I was flying in a private jet. Those are the people who can help the environment much more than I can if they flew commercial.”
There are worse things to be addicted to than racking up millions of air miles. And when you gaze from the double window of a first-class cabin on a British Airways Airbus, with a slight buzz on and that second glass in your hand, you may struggle to think of anything better.
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