As regular readers of this blog will know, I’m a big fan of packaging, compactness and travel (here and here). The secret to good business travel lies in a combination of these 3 concepts. By good, I mean efficient, effective, optimised travel.

I’ve never really bought into the long haul travel idea of taking a pill and sleeping through the journey, especially the west to east flights which tend to be overnight. For me, even though you might be shattered, you miss one of the main joys of the trip.

Airline meals on long haul flights are a wonder. Compact and bijou, they are breathtakingly well designed pieces of real estate. Everything is compartmentalised, allowing the cabin crew to offer even those of us in cattle class options for our main course and to slot in a heated meal accordingly. The output is tasty, well thought out food combinations, hygienic and with the minimum of packaging, most of which can be recycled.

Aircrafts are all about the trade offs between space, weight and power, and so you can fit maybe 40 meals into a chilled cabinet on wheels that can’t measure much more than 30cm x 100cm x 75cm. Amazing.