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