The director of the “research institute” 8. marec, Nika Kovač, does her utmost to present herself as a heroine of the working class, yet she usually “fights” for causes that have very little to do with the average worker. Her interests are abortion, euthanasia, Palestine, climate change… in other words, the standard repertoire of Ljubljana’s spoiled youth – the descendants of socialist elites.
Every now and then, she accidentally lets slip that she is not one of “you” ordinary mortals, but a typical socialist jet-setter, modelled after the Davos elite who fly to climate conferences in private jets. Nika, too, travels in style, as she inadvertently revealed in a recent social media post.
Kovač posted a selfie showing herself travelling to Brussels from an unknown location with her activist colleague Giorgi Mjavanadze, co-founder and former director of Georgia’s most prominent civil-society organisation, the Shame Movement. The caption read: “BrusselsCalling”.
Comfortably to Brussels
Aviation enthusiasts quickly pointed out that she and her Georgian colleague were sitting quite far apart (there was even room between them for an electrolyte drink that reduces sweating). Anyone who has ever sat in economy class on a passenger plane knows that people are packed in like sardines; between two seats there is usually only a very thin armrest, and touching elbows – sometimes even shoulders – is practically unavoidable.It is clear, therefore, that the “heroine of the working class” Nika travels at least in Economy Plus, if not outright in business class. After checking online, we discovered that seats like these are used exclusively by Lufthansa for its premium business class.
The aircraft is certainly wide-body, which means Nika is not flying to Brussels from Ljubljana or any nearby destination, because Lufthansa mainly uses narrow-body aircraft operated by its partners (Brussels Airlines, Eurowings, Austrian Airlines, etc.) for short European flights, while it deploys its wide-body fleet for intercontinental routes.The windows on wide-body aircraft are larger and more oval-flattened, with a noticeably deep frame (thicker fuselage wall). On narrow-body aircraft (A320, B737), the wall is thinner and the windows appear shallower because the window surface is smaller. The side walls are also straighter and more upright, indicating a wider fuselage typical of wide-body jets. So it is almost certainly a wide-body aircraft – an Airbus A330, Airbus A350, Airbus A380, Boeing 777 or Boeing 787. From the seat design, one can also guess the airline. Only two seats are visible by the window, with a lot of space between them and the aisle. It is a proper long-haul business-class seat that converts into a flat bed. The metal supports at the back serve as a movable privacy divider that can be raised or lowered. These are almost certainly Thompson Vantage seats made by the American manufacturer Thompson Aerospace. Lufthansa uses exactly these seats in a 2-2-2 layout (two together in three rows) in its premium business class, as shown in the picture below.Thompson seats are also used on other airlines, not only Lufthansa, but they are rarer and are always used exclusively in business class on long-haul wide-body aircraft. Narrow-body short-haul flights have fewer half-business classes, and manufacturers offer different (narrower and thinner) solutions for them.
What can we say with certainty?
- It is a long-haul wide-body aircraft, meaning the fighter for workers’ rights and abortion is flying to Brussels from some distant location, not from within the EU.
- The seat belongs to business class.
Although it is not 100 % certain, there is a very high probability that it is a Lufthansa wide-body aircraft (the window shape suggests an aircraft from their Airbus wide-body fleet – A330, A340, A350 or A380).How much does an average Lufthansa business-class ticket cost?Since Nika likes to travel to the United States, where she has connections with far-left American activists who adore the Cuban revolution (people like Barack Obama), we took a ticket from New York to Brussels as an example – one of the closest destinations that still uses wide-body aircraft. This is the price of a one-way business-class ticket, for instance on 10 December:The cheapest flight we found for this route in business class from New York’s LaGuardia airport costs US$7,938.20 or €6,831.93 at the current exchange rate. An even “cheaper” flight with a connection (via Frankfurt) costs US$5,616.50 or €4,833.78.Nika Kovač is therefore almost certainly flying on a ticket that cost her – or her sponsors – several thousand euros. To put that into the language of Slovenia’s crumbling healthcare system: with that amount of money, the Health Insurance Institute of Slovenia (ZZZS) could perform between four and seven cataract surgeries. Let us remember that many poor Slovenian pensioners are needlessly almost blind because they cannot afford a cataract operation. Jetset Nika, of course, lives on a different planet.
M. I.
