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Comment by Eisenstein | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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