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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

With air travel, and most kinds of tourism, and customer service, and actually with most commodified experiences, the affordability and mass availability is the thing that makes the experience subjectively worse. It's the other people. Farting. Coughing. When you treat people like animals, they act like animals. At the same time, when they act like animals, why not treat them as such?

Objectively and societally it may be better that more people have access to something, but by definition more people doing something makes it a shittier experience. No metrics or other dimensions necessary.

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Not necessarily. It isn't the amount of people that is causing your discomfort -- the airline is always going to optimize for a full plane (and environmentally, we should want them to). It is the fact that we have been taught to tolerate people when they are being obnoxious and discourteous. If the airlines just ejected people who were being an asshole and fellow travelers would call out and shame bad behavior, it might lead to a more pleasant experience.

In theory, yes, you could enforce better conduct (although this might harm the bottom line). But I also think that when you place people in cramped conditions, they inherently begin to behave more antisocially and become less amicable. For every inch of legroom or width you shave off a seat, I think there's a non-negligible amount of discomfort that leads to more annoyance, which in turn leads to worse behavior. At some point, some portion of the consumers do explode into outright hostility or madness, and the airlines mostly seem to be tuning their services to just above that point.

Money - the very high cost of any air travel prior to deregulation - used to somewhat alleviate both issues. The airlines had incentive to compete on service quality rather than chase the maximum number of seats they could pack on a plane. And anyone paying that much to fly had a reputational incentive to behave in a civilized way.

Flying private for the same amount of inflation-adjusted money as first class cost in the 1960s is a poor analogue, because it inherently leaves out the social dynamic that caused people to, e.g., wear their best clothes and don their best manners to board an airplane. There is no analogue, because first class now is not much better than what coach was back then. In other words, public air travel as it is now is a product that did not exist in the 1960s, geared to a consumer who didn't exist. And the enshittification is inevitable when the goal is maximum occupancy.

If there were an airline with double the legroom in coach for double the price of coach on other airlines, I'd fly it exclusively. No one offers that. It's a barbell with steerage at one end and a very diminished first class experience for 5x the price at the other.

Culture and behavior aren't strictly consequences of economics.

In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable, and respectful than one experiences on US flights, even though flights are still widely accessible in that region too, to my knowledge. Perhaps part of that is a side effect of reasonable train availability as well and distribution resulting from that (another great public utility we lack in the US because public good is bad or something)

> In my experience for example, people on flights outside of the US tend to be far more polite, amicable,

This doesn't seem to be true at all in my experience. Nasty behavior or punches in planes in India is increasingly common. And it will get worse as more and more people travel by plane again due to "cheap tickets".

It's not double the legroom, but "premium coach" is a thing. Coach size seats, business-class legroom.

Not really. Very crowded airports and tight seating makes whole flying experience worse than before. Nothing to do with obnoxious people.

And cheap ticket price creates same incentive as cheap gas price. If its so cheap why not just travel more. One can argue "no one is forced to fly in plane" but living in society has taught me otherwise.

This too. All else being equal, if you doubled the price per flight and halved the number of passengers you crammed on a plane, you'd have less than half as many people flying and a lot fewer flights, hence a lot less pollution. My proof of this is that if it or equal value to double the price and halve the seats, some airline would be doing it.

You make great points above and here.

I feel one key social dynamic is travel, tourism, exploring the world is relentlessly promoted as unalloyed good. Cities all over are falling over each other as great place to "explore" and "experience" much more than being good place to live, work or raise family.

If I see through this promotion I am the curmudgeon who doesn't love the joys of travel.

Agreed. I feel like if they started ejecting obnoxious passengers mid-flight, people would straighten up *real* fast.

I don't think so.

Even a villain is the hero in their own story.

For the vast majority of folks who are or would be a nuisance in flight, I'm pretty sure:

* If they hear about stories where folks got punished for being obnoxious, they'd think "I would never be that obnoxious - that is not meant for people like me". In other words, they'be oblivious to their own predilections.

* If they are placed in a situation where their instincts would lead them to being obnoxious, they.. will be obnoxious. Even if they 'know' what the consequence are. There are a few reasons for that:

* It's a crime of passion; they can't help themselves. That's the general problem with trying to use rationality to tamper down crime: Most crimes are fundamentally not rational. You don't decide that it is in your best interest to murder someone (outside of an infinitesemal % of the population that are high functioning total psychopaths). No, you do so in the heat of the moment. At which point "Rational brain telling the id to cut it the fuck out because you might be ejected from the plane" is obviously going to have absolutely no tempering effect whatsoever.

* They honestly think it doesn't apply to them. Usually because 'yes of course obnoxious behaviour should be punished by ejecting the obnoxian from the plane. But I'm not obnoxious, you don't understand! That kid is crying and driving me nuts, I had a bad night's sleep, and I have an important meeting right out of the plane so I need my rest so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, see, my intentions are good!'

Ref: Bit of a stretch, but: Similar (in culture, size, average wage, etc) locations with wildly different takes on how important it is to punish crime in order to serve as a 'warning' / to disincentivise crime by making clear that it will be heavily punished. The best place in my experience to look for this is the US where it appears to be culturally in vogue to act as some sort of wild west sheriff trope. The results? Not one iota of difference in crime rates. Or, if anything, the places that punish it more have _more_ crime, not less. And, of course, a million-and-one psych papers.

If you want to make flight less of a nuisance, the rest of this thread has the right idea I think: Given that it's so ubiquitously available and intentionally designed in that way, it's inevitable that the experience sucks. If you want the experience to be less bad, it inherently comes with a reduction in accessibility.

And on top of that, 'travel stress' is real and not something the airline industry can easily tackle. Try to imagine that travel just stresses you out. That it just does. For those who don't suffer from travel stress this can be hard to do. Maybe you have a light fear of heights; channel that. It's easy to see how the experience just kinda sucks if half the people trying to enjoy the view from some high vantage point are lightly freaking out, and they kinda have to be there for other reasons.

The person you are replying to was alluding to the fact that 'ejecting' someone out of a plane that was flying would be a demonstration the crew's intolerance for obnoxiousness. In essence, if you don't behave you will be murdered. Seeing this happen to one passenger would almost certainly make everyone else on the flight quiet down and sit still.

It would make me make a mental note to not fly that airline again.

I did appreciate the humor in someone taking my flippant comment about "ejecting passengers" quite so seriously. :)

> so I have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up

Even without any of the reasons you mentioned I shouldn’t have to yell at that mom to shut their kid up, the flight attendant should.

I’d pay 50% more for any flight where it’s the flight attendant’s job to make people and their kids shut the hell up.

Wouldn’t you?

In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly mortified herself—and, generally being closer to the screamer than anyone else is, would certainly make it stop if she could.

Screaming children test my patience too, but I’m really not sure screaming adults do much to resolve that. It’s always seemed to me that grace is the better part of maturity.

Sometimes you can get earplugs if you ask nicely.

In my experience, the mother tends to be fairly good at tuning it out after months and years of non-stop screaming and screeching.

It's easy to see when a mother is actively soothing her baby or just letting it scream as much as it wants.

It's not immature for me to expect her to control her screaming child or otherwise not bring it on an airplane.

Sometimes you simply cannot control a screaming child easily and the only way is to let them be for a while. If you don't understand it, you are really immature and need to learn some basics about human society.

> and the only way is to let them be for a while

Let them be for a while at home.

I’m a member of human society too. Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness but have the self-control not to say anything, because it’ll do no good anyway.

But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.

id pay triple to put you in the luggage compartment

I see you're new to the site. You can check out the "Guidelines" section in the footer. There's guidance on what makes for good quality comments.

> Me and 80% of the people on the plane can’t stand the selfishness

neither can I. But most of the people also understand that when a kid is crying, it is not out of parents' selfishness but rather helplessness.

> But if there were an airline that charged double for rejecting kids under the “shut up” age, I’d pay double for my seat and I bet I’m not alone.

The fact that no parent wants their child to keep crying is something that eludes you means you have very little social skills and you are amongst a tiny minority. If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.

EDIT: aha found this through your comment history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38205960

"Children irritate me and I want to block them out to the maximum degree that I am able" - I'll pray for you.

> If any airline ever proposes something like that, the backlash will be swift and massive.

This is true. But it's not a condemnation of my position: if anything, it supports my level of frustration with the status quo.

Children are necessary and must be loved. At the same time, they (usually) don't need to be on airplanes if they can't be stopped from wailing for 9 straight hours (not an exaggeration- that's what happened on my Frankfurt flight).

There are medical flights and dying relatives and migrations and so on that are unavoidable. I was the wailing child on such a flight once, the pressure killing my ears. But that flight was entirely unavoidable.

And here's what you don't seem to get: people like me accept all of it if the parent is making any effort to stop it or console/distract the child, which is what my parents spent the flight doing.

Instead, we look at the parent sitting on their phone with earphones in while the kid is wailing next to them and curse society for normalizing this.

Let's push it a little farther than a screaming child. Something the parent can control is their child hitting the back of my seat. The only time I've ever said something to a parent on a flight was when that was happening, and after several warning looks over my shoulder that the mother ignored. And what I did wasn't shout. I basically turned around and hissed at them to control their child. That stopped it without drawing any excessive attention.

Yes. Now do public school classrooms.

The seats are also too small, at least for Western men (and increasingly for women too). I am quite tall and find flying an experience to be endured by gritting my teeth, but for taller and heavier people it is almost torture. I recently saw a man with half his leg in the aisle, taking up almost all the walking space. If you are unlucky enough to sit next to a very large man, a fairly common sight especially in the US, the entire flight becomes a series of small and large movements, squirming and twisting.

However, people want to pay less and less, while airlines earn more and more. Competition is limited and I don't see how flight comfort can improve for the average passenger.

Isn't that a broader societal thing? It feels like American culture has gotten more tolerant than it ever has, and we're all to patiently zip it while the person in front of us stands on the left side of the escalator we're trying to walk up, instead of the right like everyone else. Or someone is listening to Instagram feeds at full volume on the train as they flip through one stupidity after the other.

Or is it we're scared of getting shot or punched in the face, given how much we've vilified law and order as inherently unjust and skewed, and therefore to be reimagined. And thus we grit our teeth in 'tolerance' which is a virtue of the young.

This doesn’t explain why the flexible compartment in front of me, on the back of the seats, is either less usable than 10 years ago (ie too inflexible), or doesn’t exist at all on some flights (Hello, Ryanair).

I think it's about improving the turnaround on planes. When a plane lands, the crew has to get everyone out, clean the cabin, then get the next flight's passengers in -- all as quickly as possible. The shorter this turnaround, the more flights the plane can fly, and the more money the airline can make.

Flexible seat back pockets are easy for people to stuff all kinds of trash in, so that's just one more task for the crew. Inflexible slots are harder to put trash in, and harder for passengers to notice there's trash in.

Counter offer... the turnaround time is locked in, cargo unloading and refueling, but fewer tasks mean fewer crew members needed to perform those tasks in the given time. So rather than 5 cleaners descending on an arriving plane, they can put 2 or 3 on it and pocket the 2 salaries they are no longer paying.

Just an offer, I don't actually know the airlines' historical cleaning crew requirement number trends.

It might sound funny in a juvenile way, but it just takes the uncontrolled flatulence of one impolite passenger to make the flight experience miserable for all the others. I was recently on a long-ish flight of a few hours and there was a passenger, whom I could not locate, who every 15 minutes or so was freeing themselves of some poison. The misery of the experience is difficult to describe, but I am sure that many will have felt something similar. All it takes is one rude bully to turn what should be a miraculous experience, like flying ought to be, into a depressing one. Many parallels can be drawn.

He's not a bully, hell is other people and the phantom aerial farter speaks for all of us

This is why I fly with an N95 regardless of Covid risk lol

A paper mask cannot filter out gases.

Any mask with activated carbon[1] can filter basic odors. For more gases, get a chemical cartridge[2].

[1] https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-N95-Disposable-Respirator-3-... [2] https://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-OV-AG-P100-Professional-Multi...

It seems to greatly reduce odors for me? Maybe placebo effect but it does seem to help a lot.

Also when someone farts it’s the particles that smell bad, not the air itself

Do you think he is choosing to fart? It's not a voluntary action

It is wrong to assume that it was a man. Second, yes, in the vast majority of cases, it is a voluntary action that should be frowned upon when performed in public. At least that is the case for me and the people I am familiar with and respect. In the comfort of their own homes or the middle of the vast prairie, they can pass gas on their companions or poor herbaceous plants as much as they want.

I didn't expect such a strenuous defense of people who fart like cows on an airplane and make other people's lives significantly worse.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Flatulence is as much voluntary as sneezing, sure you can try to hold it in but 1) it's not always possible and 2) it might actually be bad for you.

And for some people it can just start happening out of the blue in the wrong moment.

I'm sorry, but it seems like you're talking to a bot, some kind of artificial intelligence entity, or an alien who has never experienced the sensation of having gas in their stomach.

After this attempt at gaslighting (how dare you complain about someone who farts every 15 minutes, out of the blue, during a 6-hour flight, spreading a nauseating smell throughout the plane and making the flying experience miserable for dozens, if not hundreds, of other passengers), I wonder if the times I held back from farting, I was tapping into some latent superpowers I didn't know I had. Or, by doing so, I was putting my health and the safety of my organs at risk, and it was only by some lucky coincidence that I didn't end up in the emergency room.

There's always a convenient rationalization for bad behavior. People screaming on a plane? Maybe they got fired, were having a nervous breakdown, and holding back the screams would have landed them in the hospital. People singing at the top of their lungs during a flight? Maybe it's their way of coping with the stress of a breakup. Or maybe they're just annoying people who were never taught how to behave in public.

What feels like a rude bully, could actually be someone with a terminal bowel cancer. And just as much as they could maybe find charcoal underpants, you could also bring a $5 R95 odor-eliminating mask on the plane. I'm not saying there aren't unavoidable terrible experiences, but most of the misery people in the developed world experience is a state of mind.

I am all for interpreting other people's behavior charitably, but I would consider the terminally ill passenger to be the exception rather than the rule.

A few months ago, I was in a bar with a date and heard a noise, as if someone had farted loudly. I thought, “How is that possible?”, and looked at the woman next to us who was leaning on a nearby table. While I was mentally filing the noise away as the loud movement of a chair, the nauseating smell that reached my nostrils made me realize that my benevolent interpretation was wrong and that the woman had indeed farted loudly in a bar during happy--but not for us--hour.

There are many people who lack good manners. And the advice to “protect yourself at all times” should be limited to the boxing ring, where people are willingly punching each other, and not to airplanes.

It's not about protection as much as finding ways to cope with things you don't like. People fart. It smells for a bit, but the smell (being a gas) will diffuse eventually. You can do other things to cope, like bring things to mask the smell, but you can also just... accept it. It's just a smell.

You could get all in your head, getting angry at the person who farted, why they farted, why they shouldn't have, how could they, how dare they, etc. But that's not reducing the discomfort. It's just adding anger, which creates stress, which doesn't feel good. You have the power to use tools or thoughts to control your own psychic discomfort. Identify the discomfort, cope with it, let it pass. This enables you to turn an otherwise miserable trip into a temporary inconvenience, less stress, and generally happier life.

Although seemingly enlightened, this is a terrible way to treat other people who don't respect your right to a normal existence.

When people say, “If it won't bother you in five years, why should it bother you now?”, what comes to mind is that if someone slapped you in the face during your morning walk, in 20 minutes the pain would pass and what would remain is this lingering experience in your mind of being disrespected, humiliated, treated like a fool by another human being. Nothing much, after all. You can identify the discomfort, cope with it and let it pass. In 5 years, it would be nothing but a distant memory. It is just a slap, who cares? People do boxing Muay Thai and MMA and get punched, slapped, and kicked at any training session. How can you be bothered by somebody slapping you during your morning walk? Next time, you can bring your headgear if you don't want to feel pain for those 20 minutes. Not much of a hassle.

Following your reasoning, if you see someone letting their dog defecate, I don't know, on your lawn every day at 7:30 in the morning, you should just let it go, who cares, all animals defecate and you shouldn't bother. It would be like having a superpower that would leave you with a more peaceful and happy life, maybe with a collection of excrement on your lawn or maybe with you, or me, or anybody else kneeling to pick up that feces a few minutes after the fact. It could be a good motivation to exercise and lubricate one's joints, after all.

It is a great way of thinking, but I am still among those who do not like to get slapped during my morning walk and don't appreciate dogs defecating on my lawn. Maybe I am old-fashioned.

What are you going to do about it? The farting, for example. You gonna stick a cork up their butthole? No; you're just going to sit their in your seat and feel upset. Doesn't really matter if you have some imaginary right or not. You're just stewing in your own mental hell.

The dog shit maybe you'll do something about, and maybe you'll call the cops over the slap, but I don't see how you're going to stop the farting. Maybe ask for another seat, or trade with someone. Or bring a mask on board. Or, barring that, maybe try to use your mind to diffuse the uncomfortable feeling. But otherwise you are just sitting in your own discomfort, feeling miserable. That's the point i'm making. You don't have to be miserable.

If I see where it is coming from, I am certainly shaming them for being disgusting, impolite, vulgar, and disrespectful to other people. I am not afraid of being confrontational. If the confrontation escalates, verbally, of course, so be it.

I don't share your passive acceptance of being treated like a fool by other people. There is not a single normal person in the world saying, "You know what, what we need now is somebody farting here". As the British leader said: "Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never - in nothing, great or small, large or petty".

Real change happens when people refuse to accept the erosion of their freedom and stand up against the abuses of others. Sometimes it is possible; other times, such as when it is not possible to identify the abuser, it is not, and we must carry on, but I hold close to my heart my right to indignation.

As I wrote before, many parallels can be drawn; it is not just about somebody gassing the other passengers on a plane. For example, using Bluetooth speakers in public spaces.

I recall that at work, I had a colleague who would put their bare feet on the desk, next to another colleague's. I told the affected colleague, who seemed reluctant to take a stand: "You tell them to put their feet down, get the respect you deserve". In the end, according to your Zen way of life, who cares? What are you gonna do, cut their feet? But I don't think I was wrong.

Believe it or not, I think some of this excessive flatulence can also be blamed on the airlines trying to save cost. And I don't just mean on the "short rib and pasta salad."

I'm old enough to remember when passengers lit up once the No Smoking sign went off.[0] Whatever you may think about whether that's as rude as passing gas, it was much more socially acceptable (and probably masked a lot of farts).

So, a friend's father who was a career mechanic for American Airlines once told me that when smoking was banned on planes, the airline found they could drastically reduce the amount of bleed air they introduced to the cabin, thus reducing aerodynamic drag and increasing fuel efficiency. I don't remember by how much he said the fresh air was reduced, but it was something like an order of magnitude. Whereas in the smoking days, the cabin air was completely refreshed every 30 seconds or something, now it's like every five minutes.

The result being more germs and viruses floating around the cabin and, presumably, more recycled farts.

Maybe one of the airline folks on HN can confirm this, and also whether it's changed at all since Covid.

[0] Side note: On a recent flight, I had a bet with my companion about the No Smoking sign. She believed that it could not be turned off. I countered that there would be no reason to have an illuminated sign at all if it couldn't be turned off. Why waste the light bulbs? Just put a sticker there. Clearly they had a lit sign because some charter airline somewhere, or maybe a privately owned 737, might still allow people to smoke.[1] Anyway, we were sitting in the first row by the bulkhead, and a little while later the pilot came out for a coffee break. So I asked him to settle our bet. He said, "Watch the sign," and went into the cockpit. We watched it. Nothing happened. He came back out and asked, "Did it go off?" We said, "No." He grinned and said, "The switch is still there, but it's disconnected."

[1] I know the thing about the ashtrays in the lavatories being a safety measure, so that in case someone decides to smoke in violation of all common sense, at least they might not throw it in the toilet.

The problem with air travel is it is too fast. Or at least it is presented as fast. This implies if something is unpleasant, it shouldn't be a big deal because you shouldn't be exposed to it for long.

The on the ground part of flying has certainly gotten worse (honourable mention to Brexit). Which for flights of modest length is actually the longest part of the process. People keep coming up with creative ways of making it more painful.

Flying out of Cyprus was a good example, they have some crazy system where you have to print off a bit of paper at a kiosk to...well I really don't know what it did to be honest, verified your passport?

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