Seriously, what’s the deal with airline food? Flying from Germany to France last month I ate a “cucumber and quark sandwich with herbs.” Quark is a type of cheese, if you’re unfamiliar with dumb-sounding fermented milk products. Anyway, it was bad. But that’s not the point. Eating that confusingly pungent sandwich made me realize the airline industry is full of questionable practices.
For starters, who sets Lufthansa’s inflight menu? There’s probably an entire culinary staff that decides which terrible German cheese to give people for lunch. They don’t need to hand out five-star meals, but serving “cucumber and quark sandwiches” is borderline disrespectful. The complimentary pair of earphones would have been equally edible. That’s unfair, but last week a pastry chef in Berlin refused to direct me to a post office so I feel no sense of loyalty to German cuisine.
Here’s another question about aviation: why is just anybody allowed to sit beside the emergency exits? If the plane goes down, you have to trust that person to figure out the handle so you can get off the plane. Shouldn’t it be somebody more responsible than me? I only sit next to the emergency exits because I booked my ticket after everybody else and nobody wanted that seat. I’m clearly not responsible enough to be an integral part of the evacuation plan. I barely know how to open the trunk to my Volvo. It took me almost four trips to move my belongings to Charlottesville last year because I had to fit everything in the back seat. You don’t want my help.
I would probably understand the protocol better if I paid attention to the flight attendants’ safety demonstration, but their tidy outfits and clear gestures distract me. Why are they all so self-assured? Do flight attendants get a power trip from knowing so much about plane safety and carry-on dimensions? Next time you’re on a flight, pay attention to their directions. More importantly, notice how they only describe the procedure for water landings. If water is not involved in your emergency landing, the flight attendants cannot help you. If there is water, they can help in a really condescending tone.
Also, I know airlines record conversations in the cockpit in case of plane failure, but what do they do with cockpit voice recordings when the flight goes perfectly? Do you think they keep the recordings of pilot small talk? I want to hear two pilots talk about their weekend plans. Do you think anybody has ever said “TGIF” while landing a plane?
That’s the other thing. We forget how amazing it is that human beings know how to land a plane. We can fly! Every day, thousands of flying machines travel all over the world. Amazing! We can go from the United States to France in eight hours. Think about what a pain it was to travel internationally before the 20th century. You had to sail for months and months to reach your destination. Now you just take a Xanax, watch 20 minutes of some Jennifer Lawrence movie and wake up on the other side of the Atlantic. Can you imagine telling that to Christopher Columbus? He would say something like, “What? I don’t speak English. Who are you?”
Nancy-Wren Bradshaw is a Humor writer.
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