Defensive Flying

I don’t have wings, yet I spent much of yesterday flying. The human body isn’t designed to spend hours on end in the air, certainly not cooped up in economy class and most definitely not as the financial plaything of an Irish horse fancier.

I just put in a nine hour shift in the cramped hell of cattle class. By British law a sheep heading to the slaughterhouse is required to have more personal space than I was given on the Airbus. Probably. Whether that urban myth is correct or not, it’s certainly true that an aircraft passenger today has much less space than say, thirty years ago.

I get really defensive of my allocated space on a plane, spreading myself out to its very limits on both available armrests and slumping down in my seat so that I can wedge my knees hard into the back of the one in front. Woe betide the person in front of me if they try to recline their seat. We’ve all paid for the same amount of space, I’ll be damned if I’m letting them steal a few of my ridiculously expensive inches. There’s no way I’m going to fly from one continent to another with someone’s headrest in my face.

Another fun way of passing the time is to draw up a virtual hit list of those passengers that you would gleefully use as floatation devices should the plane go down in water unexpectedly. These are the people that I’d willingly volunteer to be the first overboard should we suddenly need to lose weight to stay aloft. They’re the people who slam their seats back as far as they can go the second that the ‘fasten seatbelt’ sign goes out, or those who let their children run riot up and down the aisles in an attempt to tire the little loves out so that they’ll sleep later. But how about those of us who are trying to sleep right now? Does our rest not count for something? They wouldn’t allow their precious cherub to run up and down a hotel corridor at three a.m. would they?

Plane drunks who take serious advantage of the free drinks still found on many long haul flights: I’d willingly eject them at 30,000 feet too, along with chair leaners. They’re the ones who are oblivious to the fact that their resting on a seat back while they chat to their mates causes that chair to pitch back suddenly resulting in instant nausea at best, or occasionally even a Leonard Rossiter / Joan Collins-style spillage (ask your granny).

Of course all of these people are also drawing up their own hit list, top of which is probably the fat bloke spreading out to make sure that nobody invades ‘his’ space… 

© Shaun Finnie 2012