This seems to work. Well. I think we’ll be using it a lot in future.

You register with DCalling, which will get you a small credit on your DCalling account (25 cents, if I remember correctly), to allow you to try out the service. If you like it, you can top up your account in units of 20 Euro, which will be enough to keep you going for over 17 hours if you are making international mobile phone calls to land-lines within Europe.

They give you a unique free-phone (0800) number for every country that you can call locally and then enter the “destination number” in the country you wish to call. The number identifies you, as well as being the gateway to cheap calls. This is how they know whose account to charge. The only cost should be 1.9 cents per minute which they charge to forward the call to your destination number, if it is a land line in Europe. (I say “should be” as I haven’t yet checked the balance on my Spanish pay-as-you-go phone to make sure the local call is really free in Spain). You can also set up a phone book of frequently called numbers, for which you can define short-dialling codes on DCalling’s web site. So, for instance, our home phone number might have the short-dialling code of “1″. I can then dial “1″ instead of our home number when I am using DCalling.

That sounds much more complicated than it is. Here’s how I used DCalling in Spain, calling home using a mobile phone with a Spanish SIM card:

• Call my personal freephone number in Spain
• Wait for the announcement to telling me to dial the number I want (in my case our home phone number)
• Dial my short dialling code for our home number: “1#” (the # sign causes the call to be routed via DCalling)

That’s it. After that the phone rings and I am through to Ruth. I’ve set up short codes for her mobile phone, her office phone and the numbers of several people in Spain, who I may from time to time want to call on my mobile from Germany. If I call Spain from Germany, I use a different free-phone number, which is a local German number. I can get the free-phone numbers for all the countries I want to make calls from by visiting my account page at DCalling’s web site. I have entered them into my phone book, so I always have them with me.

If my destination phone number is a mobile phone, instead of paying 1.9 cents per minute, the cost is around 20 cents per minute within Europe, which I think is also very reasonable. (The DCalling price list for call charges is here). DCalling also offer call-back services for countries where they don’t yet have a free-phone gateway.

If you refuse to be scanned, you might be offered the “choice” of a very thorough and intimate pat-down or not flying.

As a result, it’s a good idea to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare – the check-in process is slow. It doesn’t even detect weapons or bombs being smuggled onto planes. That’s why after each successful smuggling attempt which is detected after the event, you have to jump through more hoops. Take your shoes off; hand in liquids from your hand luggage.

There has to be a better way. That’s what even the airline bosses are saying. There is.

The Toronto Star ran an article last December about the “Israelification” of airports. The goal at Ben-Gurion Airport is to move fliers from the parking lot to the airport lounge in a maximum of 25 minutes:

…Despite facing dozens of potential threats each day, the security set-up at Israel’s largest hub, Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport, has not been breached since 2002, when a passenger mistakenly carried a handgun onto a flight. How do they manage that?…

Read the article. There’s been a lot of debate in Europe about the need to get rid of unnecessary checks and delays in the check-in process. We need to look to Israel on this one.

Nearly 96 percent of the occupants involved in a Part 121 aviation accident over the past 18 years survived the accident, and in over 46 percent of the most serious of these accidents (accidents involving fire, serious injury, and either substantial aircraft damage or complete destruction), more than 80 percent of the occupants survived.

Nonetheless, there are several things you can do to improve your chances of surviving a crash. There is an article on Wired’s “How To” Wiki, summarising the main points – it’s not long, and is worth reading if you are going to be flying in the near future.

Passengers travelling between EU countries or taking domestic flights would have to hand over a mass of personal information, including their mobile phone numbers and credit card details, as part of a new package of security measures being demanded by the British government. The data would be stored for 13 years and used to “profile” suspects.

Brussels officials are already considering controversial anti-terror plans that would collect up to 19 pieces of information on every air passenger entering or leaving the EU. Under a controversial agreement reached last summer with the US department of homeland security, the EU already supplies the same information [19 pieces] to Washington for all passengers flying between Europe and the US.

But Britain wants the system extended to sea and rail travel, to be applied to domestic flights and those between EU countries…

In fact, according to a recent article by John Lettice, some of the protest from the EU against the USA’s data collection is caused because the EU bureaucracy has been unable to coordinate an agreement with the USA fast enough to stop the USA forming bilateral agreements with some EU-states which don’t have a visa waiver agreement in place with the USA, thus undermining the EU’s position when negotiating deals with the USA. Given that the UK government has been regularly involuntarily leaking data about millions of its citizens recently (lost DVDs and CDs have become a regular topic in the British press in the last 2-3 months), this enthusiasm for collecting even more data really can’t be considered a good idea.

The USA under George W Bush has moved much closer to a soviet-style regime in another way: the Transport Security Administration (TSA) has just published a proposal that all air passengers will have to apply for permission to fly to/from or over the USA 72 hours in advance of their flight for “security screening”. Only if you get a clean bill of health will you be issued with a boarding card. Non-travellers entering secure areas, such as parents escorting children, will also need clearance. (If you don’t fancy ploughing though a 1MB PDF, the Register has summarized the main points here).

Apart from sounding very like the thin edge of requirements similar to those in Russia to have internal passports for movements within Russia – a requirement which is about to be lifted, by the way, I can’t imagine that it will help tourism, which despite the cheap dollar has been suffering from the increasing bureaucracy associated with trying to arrange travel to the USA.

We walked in to get the tickets and met a very long line of people waiting to do the same. After 10 minutes of waiting, a “Question Answerer” came by and made it clear why it was taking so long: the sales people had to explain the “packages” and pricing to each and every person in the line. This was not because the package was that complex, but because each person in the line thought they were going to be paying $25 per person. In reality, the tribe was charging another $50 on top of the $25 for each person. You read that right, 75 bucks a pop. The “Question Answerer” explained it to us:

“The investor wants to get his, that’s the $25. But it’s our land, and we don’t get any of that $25, so we have to get ours too, you know?”

On top of the $75 you need to add tax, making $83 per person. For that price, by the way, you are not allowed to take your camera onto the Skywalk.