Anneka Rice, Ryanair Treviso-Stansted about 10 years ago.
Archie MacPherson was in the same crowd of people at CDG waiting for news on how we were getting home after a slew of cancelled flights to UK. He musta had a business class ticket, though cos he got an earlier replacement than us.
Maxine Peake walked past the window of a café in Bloomsbury where I was eating lunch last weekend.
And Wayne Sleep walked past me at Victoria when I was waiting for the Gatwick Express once, so nearly on a flight. Ish.
Well if we're allowing that kind of tenuous link, I saw Brian Moore on the train to Gatwick once. He got off there at least, I stayed on to Brighton where I got a) drunk and b) heatstroke.
1. John Lee Hooker and I shared a flight from Orange County to San Fran. His intoxicated female companion incurred the wrath of the stewardesses by dashing to the loo as soon as the plane touched down.
2. Louise Redknapp and I flew Manchester to Dublin. She was tiny. I started obsessing over how she and husband Jamie actually managed to do it.
John Simpson and cameraman from Amman to London after they had both been slightly injured by a US bomb in NW Iraq (and their local fixer had been killed).
I didn't know he was on the plane until we got off and I met him between the gate and passport control. We chatted for a fair while until baggage control, about the war, about Palestine (where I was coming from) and about politics in general. His views, you'll be unsurprised to learn are very sound indeed.
Ian Paisley senior, quite a few times
Sundry other NI hacks
Kate Hoey MP at the football last month
John Fogerty (same departure lounge if not flight, I avoided eye contact as his baby daughter was gurning loudly)
Tom Baker was in the departure lounge of a flight I was on once. I'd have assumed he was on the flight itself, but I didn't see him again so cannot guarantee this. Maybe he bottled it, or simply travelled by police box instead.
My old man once told us that he'd crossed the Atlantic with Perry Como*, who was apparently very pleasant company. A year or two later he was sat next to Virginia Wade who apparently refused all offers of food and instead talked rather more than he'd have liked.
(*On a flight, obviously. They weren't wrestling the controls of some rickety boat.)
sw2bureau wrote: I went to meet my mate at Heathrow about twelve years ago off a flight from New Zealand via LAX and Boris Johnson got off before him.
Not on a flight I was on, but I saw Harold Wilson shuffling through Heathrow Airport one day in 1986. My grandparents were flying to or arriving from Australia that day.
Sat next to Johnny Marr on a Manchester-Amsterdam Easyjet. Judging by his cases he was travelling on business, which makes one wonder about the size of the fees he is getting. He looked miserable as fuck, but that might have been due to sharing an armrest with my colossal bulk.
Saw him again a couple of months ago at Manchester Airport. His metamorphosis into a cross between John Cooper Clarke and a dinner lady continues apace.
Saw a huge contingent of folk in KNVB blazers and tracksuits at Schiphol a bit ago. The only one who stuck in mind was Michael Reiziger, whose face looks even weirder in real life than it does on telly.
[Edit: it's all coming flooding back to me! I also saw Frank de Boer in the same airport on the same day, but I don't think he was with the KNVB mob. He was sunburnt to a degree ridiculous for even a pasty Northern European.
And I got stuck behind Ronald Koeman in the check-in queue once. Another (presumable) millionaire who travels on budget airlines. Seemed overly cheerful. Is it weird that, even though I've never given half a shite about the England football team, my initial impulse would be to call him a cheating prick who did Graham Taylor out of a job?]
Sat next to Jörn Donner on a flight from Helsinki to -- I think -- Brussels, presumably at a time when he was an MEP.
Sat across the aisle from Mika Salo and family on a flight from Helsinki to Milan, at the time that he was driving for Ferrari. No prizes for working out where he was going.
Sat in economy class on a flight from Helsinki to London while Chris Tarrant and entourage returned home in business class from setting up our version of Who wants... I don't know what the hell they got up to, but they left by far the biggest mess I've ever seen on an aeroplane.
Shared a flight with Tommi Mäkinen from Milan to Helsinki, and separately with the very pissed and appropriately named Juha Kankkunen. I know the latter flight was to Helsinki but I don't remember where from. Maybe I was in the same state as him. Oh, and just remembered that I've been on the same flight a few times between Helsinki and Oulu with the bloody awful Suvi Linden.
How strange. I had forgotten about my flight from London to Amsterdam with Edwin Van Der Saar. It was after Manchester United had played at Chelsea in 2008.
On the way back from the WSC-run trip to the 1994 African Nations Champ Finals, we were all sat in a fairly small plane at Tunis airport waiting for quite a while. Then Bobby Charlton and his wife were escorted across the tarmac onto our plane; they were placed in the seats in front of me, then a curtain was pulled across between us, to denote 'first class' I guess. We struck up a chorus of 'we've got Bobby Charlton, on our plane', which was kindly acknowledged with a lean-out, look-back smile and wave.
On a trip to Vienna some years ago, on Lauda Air, I thought that I heard the Captain say 'Captain Niki Lauda here...', and was astonished when, after the flight landed, he was straight out of the cockpit to say 'bye' and sign autographs as we disembarked.
Tenuous, but still travel-based: Lucy Kellaway (the FT's resident, irreverent, annoying, grammarian) told me to turn down my music when she sat next to me in the first-class* compartment on a t=the Edinburgh-to-London train. The fact that I had eight beers in my bag made her face turn disapproving school-marm. I did have a copy of The Economist, though, which smoothed her fraying horror.
*the first-class ticket was £5 more, before you go oohla-la.
Georges Marchais, the most prominent French Communist and longtime poster boy of the PCF, was a few rows up in the economy section on my flight from Paris to Tenerife in the early 1980s.
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