Imagine spending the best part of 17 hours stuck in a tiny room with somebody you really dislike, with no opportunity to escape, while being required to constantly interact.

This is what happens when two pilots who don’t get on are rostered on the same flight route.

Pilots may all sound the same over the tannoy but they are real people with real feelings, and in the same way that you might think your colleague is a wazzock, so might they.

And as it is particularly important that the flight deck - basically a pilot’s office - hosts a calm, considerate and communicative environment, airlines have developed a system to stop two people who hate each other getting stuck in there together.

Called “Do Not Pair”, the system works thus: each captain, first and second officer has an electronic list which feeds into the carrier’s scheduling system, to which they can add the names of anyone they do not want to be sat beside for hours on end. The rota then prohibits those two names ending up in the same cockpit.