Ask the pilot

Much of what frustrates us about flying doesn't take place during flight at all. It's getting on and off that's really irritating.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Environment, Flying, Airlines, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot

March 7, 2008 | S 004 12' 46", W 070 29' 20" -- It's not often you see a dateline composed of latitude and longitude coordinates, but that's the easiest way of describing this place -- a jungle lodge on the borders of Colombia, Peru and Brazil, three hours by fast boat from the Colombian town of Leticia. I've dispatched columns from some exotic places in the past, but never from a thatched-roof cabin on the banks of an Amazon tributary. If this one feels a bit looser and more casual than normal, I blame it on the setting. There's a languor in the air, to say the least. (And if not for the lodge's daily, three-hour allotment of electricity, I'd never have finished this thing.)

Being in the Amazon also has a way of putting one in a certain ecological frame of mind. That's much the point of being here, I guess, and it's a fitting coincidence on the heels of my recent two-part series on airlines and the environment.

Speaking of which: If my flight from the United States to Colombia was any indication, my estimates on the volume of in-flight trash production were woefully conservative. Within a half-hour of departure I had already gone through three plastic drinking cups: one cup for the orange juice served during boarding, another for the Coke Zero I drank after takeoff and yet a third accompanying the small bottle of wine that came with my dinner. I never had the chance to say no.

Oh, and dinner itself? Somewhere in that assemblage of plastic trays and cellophane wrappers was actual food. The weight of the packaging clearly outweighed the edible parts. Most ridiculous of all was the little foil-sealed container of water included in the setup -- that'd be taza numero cuatro -- a needless and wasteful accessory seeing how the in-flight meal is always accompanied by a beverage service.

Did I say "languor in the air"? Not even a page later and I'm already griping about something that happened five days and 5,000 miles ago. The gravity of Amazonia is no match for a crank like me. Why can't I just mellow out? Then again, to recall Werner Herzog's famous and hysterical soliloquy (filmed near Iquitos, less than a hundred miles from here), we shouldn't idealize the jungle, a place of angst and "misery" and murderous natural struggle. Sounds like flying.

Right, so, and another thing:

Ladies and gentleman, your attention please. None of us enjoys the tedium of boarding and disembarking from a crowded airplane. We walk, we stand, we wait; we walk, we stand, we wait. Those bottlenecks and the throat of the jetway can be hellish, and it often takes several minutes to get from the doorway to your seat, or vice versa. But if you want to make it slightly easier on your fellow travelers, a simple recommendation: When boarding, please, for the love of God, do not place your carry-on bags in the first empty bin that you come to. Use a bin as close to your seat as possible.

It drives me crazy when I see a guy shoving his 26-inch Tumi into a bin above Row 5, then continuing on to his assigned seat in Row 52. I know it's tempting, but this causes the forward bins to fill up quickly. Because airplanes are usually boarded back to front, there are no spaces left for subsequent passengers whose assigned seats are in the forward part of the cabin. They are forced to travel backward to stow their belongings, then return upstream, against the flow of traffic, clogging the aisle.

Then, after landing, the same thing happens in reverse, only now it's worse because everybody is moving up the aisle en masse, hurrying to get off. Heaven help the poor sod who has to navigate rearward to retrieve his stuff. It happened to me the other day. I was seated in the very first row of economy, yet I was the last person off the plane.

Am I wrong to suggest that assigned bins might be a good idea? People I've spoken with are skeptical -- there are a lot more seats than bins, they argue, and not everybody carries the same size carry-ons -- but I'm convinced there's a way to make it work. If nothing else, airlines should make a gateside announcement requesting that passengers please use compartments at or near their seats.

Next page: How come only one door is used for boarding and deplaning?