It's a guilty secret, but the truth is I've always loved long-haul flights, writes David Fickling.
Yes, the food is bad; yes, the films are worse; and yes again, all that aviation fuel is fatally damaging to the environment. But what the hell? Being waited on in a state of complete passivity has a certain luxury to it. Added to which, there's a hypnotic calm that comes over you once you manage to screen out the background roar of the aircraft. No one talks much; in-flight radio subdues the passengers into silence.
Best of all, you are in one of the last mobile phone-free zones in the world. Ever since Neil Whitehouse, a Nottinghamshire oil worker, was jailed in 1999 for using his mobile on a flight to Spain, we've all known to switch the thing off.
It was a beautiful dream, but it couldn't last: now BMI is to become one of the first airlines in the world to test a new system that allows passengers to spill details of their private lives to their neighbours from the comfort of their seats.
The system will be rolled out on BMI and TAP Portugal from the end of next year - so you don't have long left to catch that flight to a corner of the world still free of the Crazy Frog.
Ten years ago, we would have advised you to head somewhere in the developing world. In the internet's first spurt of growth in the late 1990s, pessimists liked to point out that only one in 10 people in the world had ever made a phone call; now, though, the phone-free spaces of the world are rapidly dwindling. According to the International Telecommunication Union, the number of land lines and mobile users increased fourfold between 1993 and 2003.
The Guardian reported last week that even in small African villages without electricity, mobile phones are a growth industry, with 60% of people in sub-Saharan Africa now living within range of a mobile signal.
Londoners used to depend on the underground to be last to embrace any new technological innovation, but the tube's phone-free status is now on its way out as well.
It's enough to make you want to run away to a Pacific island - and, fortunately, there's one to fit the bill: the former penal colony of Norfolk Island, off the northeast coast of Australia, voted to ban mobile phones back in 2002. Ominously, however, one mobile phone information website already has its eye on the place.
