Here’s a new tip for airlines wishing to improve their on-time schedule. Let’s say a flight is bumped back an hour beyond the ticketed time. Instead of listing “Delayed” on the board and on record, list “New Time.” It’s all in the marketing! You didn’t want that 1:30 departure time, anyway; 2:30 has a much better ring to it. 1:30 is so “one hour ago.” It’s not a delay; it’s a new and improved time!
American Airlines pulled this stunt for my flight out of Miami this afternoon, then made us board the airplane and sit another hour for unexplained reasons. (I think it was because of high winds. According to Reuters, it wasn’t because of the well-publicized TSA ineptitude today at LaGuardia’s Delta Terminal, which supposedly only affected outgoing flights.) The icing on the cake was our captain’s apology for the “one-hour delay,” as if the hour before that one had disappeared in the three-cornered winds of the Bermuda Triangle
But when the cabin door was secured, the fun had only just begun. An hour after takeoff, we learned we had a Crying Baby On Board, and by the tiniest nuance of human voice, you could tell the child was responsible for its tantrum and not external forces like colic or inner ear pressure. You know how we’ve been told to never shake a baby? This one needed shaking like James Bond’s martini. That site I just linked to lists suggestions for coping with a crying baby. Here’s another tip: if you follow the “walk the baby around holding him/her close to you” tip, don’t do it repeatedly on a 757 full of cranky passengers after it’s obvious the child will not be silent as long as it has an audience. The baby screamed up and down the aisle, distressing people in its wake and causing able bodied men to catch each other’s eyes with a primeval look, the same look the guys on Flight 93 had, one that said wordlessly, “If we rush the mother now, we can take her down and the child.”
After an hour of crying, the Gods of Comedic Timing saw to it that the baby fell asleep followed shortly by a bing! and a flight attendant slamming onto the cabin PA system to tell us that the captain had turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. Lo and behold the baby woke up and relaunched its fit and I think at least a few people were wondering why the captain couldn’t illuminate some sort of “eject baby” sign so everyone on the left side of the plane could look out his or her window and watch a blanketed bundle arc gracefully over Delaware.
When the plane landed, the baby ceased its reign of terror. During our grim shuffle onto the jetbridge, someone turned on that soft departure music some airlines play over the PA. It’s usually generic New Age noodling, but this time I swear it was Radiohead’s “No Surprises,” played so quietly I could just make out the distinctive glockenspiel. It’s a lullaby of a song but with depressive-voiced lyrics referring to anarchy, chronic injury and death. It also includes the refrain, “No alarms and no surprises/Silence, silence,” which was about right.