June 18, 2021

"On my first flight in 15 months, of course we were rerouted back to the gate because two passengers got into a physical altercation over elbow placement upon arm rests."

Said one passenger, quoted in "Passengers kicked off United Airlines flight after brawl over armrest" (NY Post).

Ugh! Just stay off planes, maybe. But I approve of this precise rule for ending the eternal armrest struggle: 

Aisle gets the outside arm rest and some leg and body room. Middle gets two arm rests and window gets the armrest and window/wall to lean on.

That's the solution! The middle seat is the worst seat, everyone knows. The person in the middle seat is the only one without an armrest all to his own and without a person-free space to lean over into. So, yeah, this person gets the last word over how the 2 "internal" armrests will be used.

2 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Temujin writes:

Yes, flights have gotten very weird since our gift from Wuhan arrived and shut us down. It also made people nuts, both from the constant drumbeat of fear porn, and being shut off from other people and their normal lives for months. Hell...I was just reading today that Michigan is just now going to fully open next Tuesday. We've been open for over a year here in Florida, so I guess the fear porn was particularly strong in Michigan.

Anyway, as someone who up until this past year used to fly every other week, every year for 30 or so years, I've made note of the sudden increase in in-flight incidents occurring on domestic flights. Serious incidents in which people are either getting into fistfights with flight attendants or actually trying to take down the plane. I've also noted that the flight attendants are more tightly wound than they used to be, so given various airlines, I suspect they're given certain information to have them on high alert for any types of behaviour. And they seem ready to threaten the passengers for looking at them sideways. Throw in that the rest of the population is on edge, it's not a good mix. Especially in the air.

Everyone, everywhere seems particularly on edge and ready to blow out these days. Between our politics, our insistence on race-in-your-face diatribes, and a lot of economic uncertainty, a lot of people are ready to strike out at the next person who looks at them wrong. I don't fly much anymore (recently retired) but when I do, I'm very cognizant of the people and sounds around me. Not that I can stop what's going to happen, but I can break out my parachute if it gets bad.

What? You don't bring a parachute with you on a plane?

Ann Althouse said...

Fouquieria writes:

My husband and I were on our first flights since the shutdown, just recently. to and from our vacation. Passengers seemed conscious of spacing while waiting to board, although the process took longer because of it. No one seemed paranoid, mostly just done with the whole charade.

The flights themselves were perfectly fine but the constant harping about masking by the flight attendants was crazy. All of the focus on keeping one's mask on (to the extreme of in-between bites of food/sipping drinks) when now, with many being vaccinated, seemed like overkill. And in our case, we needed to have negative COVID tests to even get to our destination. Many others on our flights seemed to be in same boat, looking as if they were returning from Disney, or similar places.

If I'm not mistaken, environmental tests have been conducted on the ventilation for aircraft since this whole thing started and those tests have indicated that the ventilation is quite adequate.