Flying This Summer? Here Are Some Airborne Advisories

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By Ed Goldman

A flight attendant recently shared her 12 etiquette rules for Summer traveling in a New York Times piece—things like, “Clean up after your kids,” “Keep your socks on” and “Don’t forget to flush.” To summarize, “Don’t be an inflight pig. Save that for home.”

While well written and thoughtful, it was also one-sided, telling customers how we ought to behave but making no mention of how flight attendants and airlines themselves ought to comport themselves. Two days before the official start of Summer, here are some advisories.

1. Attendants: Please don’t bolt, harness and padlock yourselves into your seats and start muttering silent prayers as the pilot informs us there’s nothing unusual about the plane flipping upside down as it approaches O’Hare Airport.
2. Airlines: Please don’t tell us we’re returning to the airport because of “a slight engineering glitch” when those of us on one side of the plane can see two of the engines completely engulfed in flames.
3. Attendants: Please enforce the “Turn off your electrical devices” dictum with the clown sitting on the window seat in my aisle who’s still FaceTiming his drug dealer as we take off.
4. Pilots and Attendants: Please don’t tell us “Welcome to Los Angeles” when we still have 20-30 minutes more before landing. Especially when we thought we were arriving in Reno.

5. Ticket Takers: Please don’t tell us to “start lining up” in rows A, B or C 25 minutes before the plane we’re going to board has even landed. Either that or cover up those big windows at the airport since they allow us to see our plane has yet to arrive.
6. Airlines: Please consider hiring a choreographer to work with the baggage handlers whose casual attitude about tossing heavy Samsonite sets onto a pile of soft luggage doesn’t constitute poetry in motion. Because of those big airport windows, all we can’tclearly make out are the smirks on their faces as they lay waste to our belongings.
7. Airport Announcement People: Please figure out the exact carousel the bags from our exactflight will be tumbling down and exactlywhen so we don’t have to wear down the tread of our Cobby Cuddlers dashing from receiving line to receiving line.
8. Professional Wrestlers: Please help the airlines prevent people from standing directly in front of the carousel awaiting their bags while blocking access to ours. Throw some of these people over your manly shoulders and do that oh-so-appropriate “airplane” spin until they grow sickly dizzy then toss them onto an out-of-service people mover.