well hello everyone and welcome to this english lesson where i'm going to talk about air travel i must admit i have not been on a plane for a very very long time and i think many of you could probably say the same thing at least many of you haven't been on a plane in the last year and a bit as i was revamping an earlier lesson about travel in general i realized that i hadn't done a good english lesson about air travel so in this english lesson we'll talk about air travel specifically we'll talk about
airports and airplanes and all the things that go along with traveling by air obviously if you are going to travel by air you're going to either go by plane or by helicopter i would think 99 of you would travel by plane if you were going to make a trip and it required going a long distance you are most likely going to take a plane sometimes we actually say airplane generally though we just say plane i don't think very many of us travel by helicopter although it is another way to to do air travel although i
think it's a lot more expensive i have been on an airplane i have been on a plane many times in my life probably about nine or ten times that counts as a lot doesn't it um i have never been on a helicopter i don't know what it's like i would love someday to go uh in a helicopter and see what it's like but i have only traveled by plane notice i'm flipping a lot of prepositions around there you travel by plane but when you're actually on a plane you use on i didn't want to accidentally
use in but we can use in when we're boarding the plane when you board the plane it's time to go in the plane i wouldn't say that i would say on most of the time um and then you travel by helicopter i've never been on a helicopter the place where you find airplanes is called the airport we're going to get some of the basic vocabulary out of the way first the airport is usually a large place in a large city where airplanes can take off and airplanes can land and where airplanes can be refueled and
where you can board the airplane and where you can get off of the airplane so an airport near you probably has a specific name the closest airport to me is hamilton international airport not toronto you might have thought it was toronto but it's not so different countries have different airlines in canada we have a couple of airlines the most common airline or probably the biggest airline is called air canada an airline is a company that owns planes and they put the name of the company on the side of the plane you probably have heard of
air france maybe you've heard of klm out of holland maybe you've heard of i think there's air india i think there's emirates there are a number of different airlines in the world especially if you go to the united states there are a lot of different airlines in the united states but an airline is simply the company that owns the planes and generally each country has its own airlines our airline air canada was actually in trouble this year because of the pandemic so our government just gave air canada billions of dollars so they could not go
broke when a company goes broke it means they don't have enough money to operate but air canada is good for now because the canadian government gave them a lot of money an airplane lands on a runway and takes off from a runway so if you ever see an airport from the air you'll see a number of different runways large airports have tons of runways short runways long runways generally a runway is made out of pavement or concrete it's a hard surface where an airplane can take off and where an airplane can land and most runways
obviously have numbers and they have lights along the side so that airplanes can take off and land at night as well when an airplane is getting ready to take off it needs to drive from the airport building to the runway and we actually have a special verb for this we say it's taxiing the airplane will taxi along the runway until it gets to the spot where it can line up and it can take off after an airplane lands it will also taxi from the end of the runway over to the airport maybe to the um
the terminal the airport terminal is where people get on and off of planes or it might taxi to an airport hangar which is like a big building where the airplane can go inside and they can do maintenance on it and store the airplane but anytime an airplane taxis when you see an airplane taxiing on the runway that means it is driving on its wheels in order to go to a building or to come from a building to get ready to take off so once again when an airplane goes up into the air we say that
it's going to take off it takes off from the runway and then it's in flight and then when it's in the air we have a term called airborne so when you're on an airplane you might hear the flight attendant say please keep your seat belts on until we're airborne or at some point once we're airborne we will serve the in-flight meal airborne simply means that you are in the air they might actually just use the phrase in the air airborne is a little more of a formal term but it simply means that an airplane is
flying and then of course did i use air canada for all my pictures most of them of course once a flight is over an airplane will land they will put the landing gear down and they will land so i'm using a lot of words that i don't actually have slides for i do have a lot of slides this morning so please pay attention as well to the words and phrases i'm using when an airplane is landing it will put the landing gear down so the wheels will go down and the airplane will land on the
runway there's a couple different kinds of flights and there's a lot of different ways to talk about flying or air travel and one is to say some flights are international and some flights are domestic so an international flight is a flight that goes from one country to another country if i fly from here to france that would be an international flight when i went to the airport i would want to go to the area where the international flights both arrive and take off so the departure and arrivals for international flights actually i would want to
go to the departures area for international flight international flights usually have larger planes usually some of the really big airplanes are used for international flights because they want to take as many people as they can and they're generally flying from large airports to large airports which allows large airplanes to take off in land domestic flights happen within a country so if i wanted to fly to another province i could fly from the province of ontario to the province of alberta i would take a domestic flight okay i would take a flight that does not leave
the country but simply travels within the country domestic flights these can be large airplanes but sometimes they are smaller airplanes because they travel between smaller airports so in canada we have a lot of domestic flights and international flights happening at the same time in a normal year right now there aren't a lot of flights happening there's a lot of cargo jets flying right now transporting things instead of people but there's definitely a lot less international and domestic flights so at the airport you have the arrivals area and it will be called the arrivals area if
you were going to the airport to pick someone up you would go and and wait by the arrivals area you would wait for them to come off the plane and come out of the arrivals area so when you land at an airport the first place that you are in when you get off the plane is the arrivals area and then when you go to the airport you go to the departures area so the departures area let me make this a little bit bigger you can see it on the sign there the departures area is the
place or the part of the airport you go to when you need to get on an airplane to travel somewhere and airports are generally split up this way there's usually international arrivals and departures domestic arrivals and departures some smaller airports combine all of them but usually at larger airports they will split those up so if you have a friend flying in from another part of your own country you would probably meet them in the domestic arrivals area of the airport and then of course you have arrival time and departure time these are simply the times
when your flight leaves or when your flight sorry when your flight arrives or when your flight leaves so sometimes when you know someone is coming from far away they'll say oh my arrival time is 4 p.m or they might even say my departure time is 1pm and my arrival time is 4 p.m i have a 3 hour flight but you definitely have arrival time and departure time so at airports you have gates a gate is basically the area where you get on a plane or get off a plane when you have your plane ticket it
will say that you need to go to gate 7 or you need to go to gate t9 or you need to go to gate g4 sometimes they have letters and numbers sometimes it's just a number depending on the size of the airport sometimes what airports will do is certain if it starts with a certain letter it's an arrival gate and if it starts with another letter or if it's a different number it's a departure gate but a gate is basically an area with lots of chairs where you either wait to get on your plane or
where you come off your plane your flight can be on time your flight can be delayed or your flight can be cancelled when your flight is on time it simply means if your flight is supposed to leave at one o'clock it's going to leave at around one o'clock no one nothing's perfect at an airport but if your flight is on time it means it will leave on time or if you're waiting for someone to come to the airport to land it means that their flight is on its way and it's going to land on time
if a flight is delayed obviously it's not on time but it's still happening so your flight instead of leaving at one maybe it's going to leave at two maybe there is a one hour delay or again if you're waiting for someone at the airport possibly they're supposed to arrive at 4 p.m if their flight's delayed maybe they're arriving at 4 30 or 5 o'clock this happened a lot last march many many flights were canceled when a flight is cancelled it's just not happening this is not a nice thing to see if you are traveling it's
not a nice thing to realize that your flight is cancelled especially if you're really looking forward to go going on a trip in order to get on a plane obviously you need a ticket now again we live in a modern world a lot of the paper aspects of traveling have become digital now in fact already the last time that i went on a flight i didn't have a paper ticket i just took my phone with me and my ticket was an e-ticket on my phone but certainly you can still have paper tickets that's common as
well but you do need to buy a ticket you do need to book a flight if you want to go somewhere so definitely you need to have a ticket when you get to the airport if you are going on a trip you need to go to the check-in you need to check your baggage that means you need to give them your suitcases generally at the airport there's two types of check-in now for a lot of flights you can check in at a machine where you simply enter your information and you check in and then you
can check in with a person as well i think most airports still have both although this to me seems a lot more popular now for people to check in using this machine you will get a luggage tag so yyz we say zed in canada is the airport code for toronto international airport pearson international airport you need to put tags on your luggage so that you know so that people know where your luggage needs to go to hopefully that makes sense but every suitcase needs a luggage tag or baggage tag we use a bunch of different
names for it luggage tag baggage tag both of those work let's see here um um boarding pass so in order so a ticket and a boarding pass are kind of different although they're merging a little bit into the same thing when you go digital but certainly to uh get to if you book a flight you have a plane ticket but in order to get on the plane you need a boarding pass sometimes when you go to the airport you show your ticket your paper ticket or e-ticket and it and they give you a boarding pass
or it converts to a boarding pass and that will tell you where on the plane you're actually sitting so this tells you your flight number it tells you what row you're in and what seat number you're in so your boarding pass is like the same as a ticket but it comes after the ticket hopefully that makes sense again in our current digital world it doesn't all work the same way anymore it used to be a paper ticket and a paper boarding pass and for some flights it might still be that way for some flights you
might have an e-ticket and an e-boarding pass on your phone when you get on a plane you board a plane now i must say in canada we rarely get on a plane this way okay so these people are on a a set of stairs and they're climbing up onto a plane because we have winter in canada and it's very very cold most of our airports just have a tunnel that you go through to get on the plane although some of our airports are smaller airports you would still get on a plane this way but when
you get on a plane we say that you are boarding okay when you're at the gate they might say we're going to board rows f through zed so if you have a ticket for rows f through zed or a boarding pass please report so when you board the plane you are getting on the plane i see rod in the chat say how i miss traveling yeah this is the lesson about how we all miss traveling it's a it's kind of sad um anyways as i mentioned the person who works on the plane the person who
helps you find your seat the person who maybe brings you your meal or a snack the person who explains all of the safety instructions we now call them flight attendants at least in canada i think they do in the united states as well but definitely when you go on a plane there are people that work there and they are called flight attendants let's see here the flight deck or the cockpit is where the pilot and co-pilot fly the plane so generally the pilot sits on the left i think and the co-pilot sits on the right
you can correct me if i'm wrong but the flight deck or the cockpit is where they sit generally we call it a flight deck when there's more than one person there and if the airplane only has a seat for the pilot a smaller plane we would call it a cockpit but most english speakers use both terms interchangeably okay sometimes you'll hear that a little kid got to visit the cockpit of the plane although as we have heightened security on flights now it's usually pretty rare for people to see the flight deck or to get a
visit to the cockpit um that's i think that's all things we used to do that we don't do anymore so pilot flies the plane co-pilot also flies the plane but also helps fly the plane so most of the time the pilot is flying sometimes the co-pilot will fly for a bit honestly i don't know a lot about what they do other than they take off and they land the plane i do also know though that my cousin is married to an air canada pilot that must be pretty cool because they get to travel for free
i think anyways uh if you are on a plane if you are not a flight attendant if you are not a pilot or co-pilot you are most likely a passenger so the general term for people who travel by air are air passengers you are a passenger on a plane you will be referred to as a passenger so they'll make announcements like passengers for flight c400 please report to gate 6. passengers for flight c400 may begin boarding so you have to hear listen for that word if you are traveling you are a passenger let me double
check where i am we're doing good um when you arrive at an airport you will most likely go to customs if you have arrived in a different country they will ask if you have anything to declare if you are bringing anything in when i returned to canada from other countries i needed to go through customs as well and the canadian workers would ask me the customs officials would ask me if i was bringing anything into canada but customs is where you go after an international flight and then you also need to go to baggage claim
so there will be a carousel so that's something that goes around and around and all of the luggage all of the suitcases all of the baggage will come out there we generally use at least in canadian english we generally call it luggage or you just say my bags i need to get my bags from the baggage claim we do call it the baggage claim though we don't call it the luggage claim or the suitcase claim so sometimes you'll hear people say um yep i'm landing at four i'm just gonna grab my bags from the baggage
claim i'll meet you outside or i'll take a taxi or i'll take an uber so there's a couple kinds of trips as well there's a round trip where you buy a ticket to go to a country and it can and it includes a return ticket so it allows you to go there and come back you've paid for both flights but there's also what's called a one-way ticket so that just takes you there and you don't have a ticket home so if you're going for a normal vacation maybe a week maybe 10 days maybe two weeks
you generally buy a round-trip ticket you have paid to get to your destination and you've paid to come home again but maybe you're going for a longer period of time maybe you're going to work there for a while you would buy a one-way ticket i have never traveled first class this is the most expensive kind of ticket i will never travel first class even if i had lots of money i don't think i would travel first class there's also business class i did on one of actually twice in my life i got bumped up to
business class i had bought an economy class ticket but they gave me an upgrade they bumped me up to business class so i paid for economy but i got to fly in business class so i think you understand the difference first class is the best place to sit on a plane the seats are really big the seats might even fold down into kind of a small bed you have all kinds of luxuries business class is a little more comfortable than economy class the seats are a little wider maybe you get an extra pillow and you
might have a little more privacy and then economy class is where i have flown on almost every one of the flights i've been on um it can be squishy it can be crowded sometimes it's really warm sometimes it's really cold but it's usually the most economical way to fly you can have a window seat you can have an aisle seat or a middle seat so of course a window seat allows you to see out of the plane i love having a window seat but sometimes it's hard to get out if you need to use the
bathroom the aisle seat is of course along the aisle now we had a question earlier about whether everyone called it the aisle seat back when we had members only chat let's see here let me scroll back um yeah i'll just let it go for now um we i'm pretty sure i call it the aisle seat if anyone else knows another name for this let us know in the chat but generally i refer to it as window seat aisle seat and middle seat sometimes there's more than one middle seat i was on a plane once where
it was four seats across so definitely uh the middle seat is the least enjoyable seat in my opinion with the aisle seat you have more leg room sometimes because you can stick one leg out into the aisle but leg room refers to the amount of space that you have for your legs on some airplanes there's not very much legroom on other airplanes the seats are further apart and you have more legroom when you fly on a discount airline that's the really cheap airline we call them discount airlines you don't have a lot of legroom they
put as many seats in the plane as they can there is an overhead compartment where you can put your carry on so the overhead compartment let me make this a bit bigger the overhead compartment is where you can store a small bag maybe you've brought a backpack maybe you've brought a piece of carry-on luggage we actually just call this a carry-on we've made this a noun as well as an adjective so you can call this a carry-on bag you can call this carry-on luggage or you can just call it a carrion we've made it a
noun we've nounified it i don't know if that's a word but we made it a noun so you check in and you give them your larger suitcases at the baggage check-in but you can take usually one bag on the airplane with you depending on the flight and it must be a certain size it can't be bigger than a certain size and we call this your carry-on some airlines they might let you have a carry-on and a backpack although it's becoming quite strict now what you can take you might have an in-flight meal um we also
just call this airplane food but or we might just call it a meal but if your flight is long enough at a certain point during the flight they might serve you an in-flight meal um when you get off the plane though people will just call it airplane food they'll say how was the airplane food was the airplane food any good did you get a meal was the airplane food any good so in-flight meal is the formal term and then sometimes we just call it airplane food i've had both good and bad airplane food by the
way when i went to south africa i flew air france and i had an amazing meal on the air flanks france flight so if you're from france here france i that was a good airline for some reason there's still no smoking sign or a no smoking light i don't know why we haven't been allowed to smoke on planes probably for 20 or 30 years but there is still a no smoking sign and there is a fasten seat belt sign which is interesting as well because most of the time they recommend that you wear your seatbelt
almost all the time on a flight especially if there's going to be turbulence but if you look up there's usually a no smoking sign which is always on because you can't smoke and then there will be a fastened seat belt sign um and the seat belt on an airplane of course looks like this it looks a little different than a car seat belt our car seat belts have a different buckle but you might hear this the uh flight attendant say please fasten your seat belts they might say please buckle your seat belts that's a little
more rare but between passengers you might hear people say hey it's time to buckle up if you hear someone say it's time to buckle up it means that you need to put your seatbelt on let's see here you want to wear your seatbelt especially if there's turbulence turbulence is when the airplane goes up and down really quickly or just shakes i have been on a couple of flights where there was really bad turbulence that is not fun when there's a lot of turbulence it can be a little bit scary when there's a lot of turbulence
i definitely wear my seat belt when there's turbulence and i'm pretty sure the last flight i was on they wanted us to wear seat belts the whole time i haven't traveled for a while so if you have traveled a lot more recently let me know in the chat if you uh if you're required to wear your seatbelts all the time i think you are now so we have two names for the little bag it's called an air sickness bag so if you feel sick and you need to throw up the other word is vomit um
you use the air sickness bag but the general term for it we just call it a barf bag in english when you say someone barfed it means they were sick to their stomach and all of their food came out of their mouth they threw up they vomited on an airplane sometimes people get sick and they might need to use the air sickness bag and then the general informal term for it we just call it a barf bag i don't know for some reason that makes me laugh you might have a direct flight now interestingly enough
a direct flight does land so if i take a direct flight from here to sao paulo okay it probably will still land in florida it'll probably still land once but i will stay on the same plane for the whole trip and then a non-stop flight takes off and it lands at your destination no stops along the way you might have a connecting flight so a connecting flight means you leave on one plane you land at an airport but it's not your destination you get off your plane and you get on a different plane and then
you fly again you might have one or more connecting flights in order to get to your destination i once flew from british columbia and we had three connecting flights so we landed three times and we had to run across the airport to get to our next flight and i also went on a trip once where we landed at o'hare in chicago and our connecting flight was all the way on the other side of the airport and we had to almost we had to run the whole way across the airport to get to our connecting flight
let's see here and then you might have a layover a layover might be a couple hours a layover might be all night but a layover is when your connecting flight doesn't leave right away so you land at an airport and you might have a three-hour layover you might have a four-hour layover which means you just need to you'll be at the airport for a few hours while you're waiting for your next flight to leave
