Adventures in Air Travel, or How to Survive the Material Plane

Adorable small person, annoying the hell out of his fellow travelers

According to Reddit, there is someone on every flight who will insist you exchange your comfy aisle seat for their narrow middle one. These are last minute ticket purchasers who want to sit with their significant other, or cheapskates who now want the stretching room your space would allow them. And why not when you’re small and a better fit for their seat?  Either that, or they don’t want to be around babies and children

Sadly, he or she would be in luck with me. Nothing to do with a genuine desire to help, and everything to do with me being a people pleaser. So, it’s almost guaranteed they would find me, and that my fear of making a public scene would have me cooperating. Plus, I have my own war stories about traveling with a high-volume child, so I might be willing to tolerate the baby, having learned the hard way how it felt to be that mother.

Once, when we flew as a family, the airline switched us from the three seats we’d booked and paid for, to two together, and one ten rows away. ‘That’ll work,’ my husband said straight-faced, ‘my wife and I will have the two together, and the baby can sit by himself.’ The ticket agent laughed and we kept our original seats although, in this case at least, my husband was motivated entirely by self-interest. He didn’t want to be stuck with the baby, while I relaxed elsewhere. If offered a one-person upgrade to First Class, however, he would’ve been gone in a flash. ‘No sense in us all being uncomfortable.’

But this swapping-seats thing is, as the Wall Street Journal says, ‘a one-way ticket to drama’. So, please, book ahead, pay extra if you have to, and don’t ask more conscientious people to fix your screw-up.

And while I’m at it, don’t bring a washing machine on as carry-on luggage.  Oh yes!  Singapore Air Lines, 1988, and a very large group of Greeks, who’d been shopping for electronics and stuffed the cargo bay to the gills.  The argument, between various crew members and an elderly woman with a gigantic box on a hand truck, went on for almost half an hour.  It was only settled when one of the pilots promised to personally squeeze it into the hold, although to this day I hope he just tossed it into the jetway and took off without it. Because, having won that battle, the Greeks smoked the whole flight in a no-smoking section and helped themselves to doubles of the food, leaving me and the 3 other non-Greeks in that part of the plane with no meal.  And did I mention, the movie didn’t work either. 

In the same vein, a friend once flew to Majorca with a fellow passenger who ran amok, and had to be restrained from opening the bulkhead door.   The crew duct taped him to his seat and, when he objected, taped his mouth shut as well.  I have a grudging sympathy for the poor man because my issues with flying have always centered around claustrophobia, rather than crashing.  But I still would’ve enjoyed seeing that scenario play out.

Sometimes though, the problems were of my own making.  Like flying Icelandair from New York to Luxemburg, rather than Heathrow, to save a hundred pounds.  Hey, it was 1974 and a hundred pounds was a lot of money back then.  I figured it would be easy enough to get a train from Luxemburg to London, and still show a sizeable profit.  What I hadn’t taken into account was a French Rail strike, which halted my local train at Lille and left me stranded at midnight, the only person with a through-ticket.

Balking at the cost of a hotel room, I slept on a bench and was woken at 3 a.m. by a porter who told me that a London-bound train was expected in a matter of minutes.  A special train, he said, breaking the strike to get thousands of soccer hooligans back to Britain.  I have no idea what city they’d been trashing but, given Lille’s location, probably somewhere in Belgium or Germany.  Anyway, it arrived, thousands of men, packed in like sardines, hooting and hollering from its open windows.   I was handed over to its conductor who put me in First Class with 4 middle-aged women from Argentina, and a 19-year-old boy they said was their gigolo.

Cutting corners on Laker Airways also didn’t go well for me.  For the uninitiated, Laker was one of the original cheapo airlines, strictly no frills and no refunds if you missed the flight.  I flew with them to Los Angeles, twice in the late ‘70’s/early 80’s.  In 1979 it took me 4 hours to get from Golders Green to Gatwick because of a London bus strike.  At Victoria, I missed the Gatwick Express and was stuck with a local train that stopped at Redhill for 10 minutes while the Post Office offloaded bags of mail.  By then I was in a state of semi-hysteria.  Think John Cleese in ‘Clockwise’: ‘It’s not the despair.  I can stand the despair.  It’s the hope!’  

I got to Gatwick at 12.30 for my midday departure, dragging a suitcase up a concrete staircase, running down a massive concourse to the very last desk, only to find that take-off had been delayed by 3 hours.   Relieved, but completely over-wrought, I ate one of two packed lunches I’d brought with me for the 11-hour trip, and ate the second as we taxied to the runway.  I had to buy a third on board, but Laker had planned ahead for people like me and were well stocked.    The following year was equally fraught, a thirty-minute drive from Ealing to Victoria, morphed into bumper-to-bumper traffic for almost two hours.  But this time I caught the Gatwick Express, and made it by the skin of my teeth.

Clearly, air travel is not my forte. But movies about air travel are right up my alley.  Liam Neeson’s ‘Non-Stop’, ‘Sully’, Denzel Washington in ‘Flight’ – absolutely killer!   I can trace this obsession back to my childhood with ‘The Night my Number Came Up,’ ‘The Flight of the Phoenix’ and ‘No Highway in the Sky’.  And don’t get me started on the documentaries.  If you make it, I will watch it. 

Which is what I was doing when my son (now 32) dropped by last week – and found me glued to a show on the 1977 crash in the Canary Islands.  “Really, Mum?” he said, then immediately gave me his take on the whole damned mess, casually throwing in the pilots’ names, and weather conditions at Los Rodeos.  “And you know this, how?” I asked, but he waved that away, and we went on to the best ways to survive a plane crash, which we both know because we read the same worst-case-scenario book.  My mind’s a blank when it comes to the book’s title but, for the less well-informed, this is the gist. 

Listen to the safety instructions, count the rows to the exit because you may have to find it in the dark, and don’t wear clothes that melt in a fire. 

But perhaps more important is who survives in these situations.   Google tells me:

The airline industry refers to the first 90 seconds of a plane crash as “golden time.” If you’re able to stay calm and move fast within this time frame, you have a good chance of getting out of the plane. 

These calm, fast moving passengers include most first responders – military, fire fighters, EMTs and cops – who have the training and muscle memory to make use of this 90-seconds.  They don’t need instructions; they just spring into action.  In this they are joined by most teenage boys. Spurred on by the strongest life force on the planet, adolescent boys reach the exits over the backs of seats, and the heads of dawdlers but, unlike the first responders, they keep going - down the evacuation slide and onto the tarmac.

The dawdlers, and I list myself in their number, lean towards old, fat, and female and are less swift in the life force stakes.  We are the nice old ladies who are waiting for directions from a dead crew member, or fussing with our neighbor’s seatbelt, because that’s what nice people do.  Adding to our confusion, our bodies will have gone haywire, shutting down all non-essential systems to prioritize the emergency, our eye lenses flattened into tunnel vision – the better to see the charging rhino - and our legs turned to jelly.  But the clock is ticking, and if we wait for directions, we’re lost.

So, what should we dawdlers be doing in these circumstances.  Pushing, shoving and trampling goes against the grain with many of us.  I mean, there’s a Darwinian pecking order and, if a party of nuns got out on the heels of the teenage boys, there’d be raised eyebrows all around.  The same is true of the elderly and, in my opinion, those of us who are past our due date should be last in line.  And yet, it’s ridiculous to sit there with your mouth open doing nothing.  Doing nothing foists your rescue onto emergency workers who could be elsewhere.  So, get your butt out of your seat, and be a decent citizen while taking action. Unbuckle your neighbor, and help the woman with the twins, but don’t waste a second, on the Greeks.  They’ve already bulldozed their way out through a back exit, and are smoking in the terminal. 

On a brighter note…  I will end with the ultimate obnoxious fellow-passenger story.  This didn’t happen to me, but to a friend of a friend of a friend, and may or may not be true.  But here goes anyway.  The Australian comedian Barry Humphries, for whom ‘good manners were a curiosity’, supposedly snuck a can of Heinz Russian Salad onto a plane, and emptied it into an airline sick bag.  He then stood up mid-flight, pretending to vomit loudly and disgustingly into this bag, after which he produced a spoon and ate the Russian Salad.

Another incident I’m sorry I missed.