Airline Ettiquette

The only real evidence I feel I have for knowing I have some kind of moral compass, a deontological guide is that I universally hate inconsiderate pricks. This has many applications but you might guess that Airports, Airlines, and flying are not my favorite past-times.

Having done nigh on a year of travel, I was pretty firm in thinking I didn't need to get in a plane for a few more years. I've barely left Melbourne for any reason since.

I haven't really budged on that feeling a year in, but I can say when flying to Sydney on the weekend. It seemed to me, almost as if betwixt then and now, humankind has somehow evolved into one that actually understands flying on a budget airline. A more respectful society that has pulled together.

Just as a kid started crying on the flight and I thought '...here we go.' it stopped.

I could detail the flight, but I thought it would be better just to walk through the unwritten laws, that surprisingly seemed to be obeyed on both my flight to and from Sydney.

1. Don't get a window seat, if you have ever gone to the toilet on a flight.

You should have a pretty good impression of your bladders capacity. Going to the toilet sure, it is a human right, I think, there's probably something addressing it in the Genave conventions on how you treat Prisoners of War.
It may be a right, but it's also a massive inconvenience/annoyance for other people. If you are sitting on the window and need to go to the toilet, at least one person is going to be bothered by your need to climb over them, or make them get up, shuffle down the aisle so you can get to the toilets.
On a long haul flight, okay, maybe in the course of 16 hours between LAX and Melbourne even the biggest bladdered man might have to take a slash, but here you employ Ricardo's law of comparative advantage, people on the window who will need the bathroom once in 16 hours will be comparatively less annoying than people in the window seat who need to go 3-4 times. You take less annoyance over more.
This should also apply to middle seats, which you can treat as a window seat diminished by a magnitude of annoyance to clamber out by 1.
The only exception is this, if it is your first time on a plane ever. Then you can have the window seat, possibly twice if it's your second time, but first 'night' flight or 'day'.

2. If you have the window seat, when the plane is landing, don't stick your head in the window.

You have this thing called a 'field of vision' when your head is in it's usual position at the head rest, you can see out the window and you can probably see on the lateral plane an arc betwixt 30 and 45 degrees, by tilting your head up and down, you get a vertical field of vision of about 180 degrees.
By sticking your head in to the window and sticking your nose to the glass, you don't necessarily increase your lateral field of vision, and if you do its negligible. You just change the angle of what you are looking at.
Your crowning achievement though, is in obstructing the view of the people next to you, right across to the other window with your doofus head.
If everybody just looks out the window from their headrest position, everybody can enjoy the rare sight of descending upon a city from 10,000 feet.

3. The Airline made the seating uncomfortable don't be part of the problem by reclining your seat.

This happened a lot while travelling around the world. But not in either of my flights over the weekend. Which is amazing, because those flights were on a popular budget airline.
Basically, the Airline when they commission the planes to be built for them, design them to minimise legroom, maximise the number of seats. The only thing preventing you from having to sit crouched in battery hen like cages are probably the Geneva conventions. But for some sick reason, someone said, 'okay the seating will be uncomfortable but let's allow the chair backs to recline.'
All it serves is to make you stare into someone else's reading light, and crowd the person behind you's legroom.
It also crowds their eating space, reading space, and everything they partake in from the waist up. This prompts them to have to recline their chair and make the upper half of the problem somebody elses.
Compare it to a car seat, the driver and passanger seats have a lever under them that allows you to slide the chair back on its rails, increasing your legroom. Imagine you are a 5'0 status conscious Indian lady sitting in front of Notorious B.I.G. in a car. Would you think it wise to reach forward lift up the lever and slide the seat back as far as it can go. Then reach down to your side and turn the wheel or pull the lever reclining the chair back as far is it can go, so that when you shift your eyes up slightly you can see the Big Poppa about to Pop you betwixt the eyes with a piece?
It's obvious as to why airlines don't give you the beneath the seat leg-room adjuster. I don't know why they then saw no annoyance in giving people the reclining button. Until they take this feature away removing all temptation in a short-haul flight. Just don't be an arsehole and sit upright, you will notice it is no less comfortable and far less of an affront to the person behind you.

3. If it fits, stow it under the chair infront of you.

Because the angle is all fucked to actually extend your feet under the chair anyway. So if your carry on is a backpack or whatever, don't use the overhead compartment. Carry on luggage is one of those concepts that has been totally routed by the evolution of the US airline system.
Next time you are disembarking from a plane, take note of what is the major holdup on exiting. Fuck even on embarkation. You will notice, like I do, that getting the tunnel connected to the plane or the staircar takes about 2 minutes.
People waiting to take turns to rummage around and take out their luggage from the overhead compartments is what takes at least 10 minutes to disembark after the plane has landed.
People pack too much, ever since luggage companies started designing those travel-cases to optimise the airlines carry-on regulations.
Arseholes started carrying the luggage that in the past they would have checked.
To my knowledge, QANTAS, the now defunct Ansett and Virgin Blue have never been bad, or in the latter's case never even had the chance to establish an appalling track record of losing your luggage.
The US Airlines did this with such monotonous regularity, they ended up conceding that people could just carry their luggage onto a plane. But instead of the big suitcases they had to pack 6 days of clothes into a desktop PC case sized case.
And Australian's being Australian's just imitated them.
The US has 50 states, with 50 capital cities, and probably 150 airports domestically they could accidentally send your suitcase to. Australia has 7 states, about 14 domestic destinations, and airlines that actually make profits.
The problem is, that it's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma, if you check your luggage, wishing to spare everyone else the 2 minutes it takes you to get your luggage down, and then just wait about 5-8 minutes at the turnstyle for your luggage to appear, not everyone else will follow suit, meaning you have to wait the 10+ minutes for everyone else to pull their overhead luggage out then wait the 5-8 minutes at the turnstyle in addition.
My consession is that people will never be so noble as to sacrifice a minor inconvenience for the good of people that can pack their entire wardrobe for a month into a backpack (me). But don't maximise your carry-on, minimise it and tuck it under your seat. You can retrieve that luggage before you even take your seatbelt off. You can also keep all your in flight entertainment in there without having to get up and down (or clamber over people if you are dumb enough to pack your books and magazines into the overhead compartments, then take a window seat).
And this observation seemed to finally have been made. On my flight home all three of us in row 7 my side of the aisle, had our carry on stowed under the seat in front. We would have positively shot out of the plane into the clear air of freedom if not for 6 rows in front of us that needed to back 3 pairs of shoes for a weekend in Sydney.

4. If possible, Leave your kids at home.

Okay, I never subscribed to the 'children should be seen and not heard' maxim, except when it comes to plane travel.
Particularly in my globe trotting trip, I never cared about getting the bulkhead because it is the bulkhead where they keep the baby-cots, and that would mean that in exchange for a little extra legroom, you get the pleasant company of a crying baby.
In my view the only excuse you can have for taking a baby on a plane is if you live with the father and one of you has immediate family in a foreign country. That would mean that you make one obligatory trip a year so that your immediate family can know or at least see, your annoying progeny.
Preferably you should actually pay for your parents to come to you, rather than you to them. Only if your family is particularly large could it possibly be more effecient for you to go there.
Sure I'm not much of a family man, but as per my moral compass, I simply abhore the idea that you and your kids and parents could possibly, objectively be more important than all the other people on the flight.
Basically, unless your child actually can consciously respond to feedback and adjust their behaviour, you should leave them at home. Since beating the shit out of kids has become illegal, and furthermore kids as young as 5 are amazingly wise to legality, this means you could have a child as old as 17 that you should leave at home if they don't shut up when you tell them to.
What can I say, I'm not a family man. I believe everyone on a flight should suffer the discomfort in quiet dignity. I'm sure there are people put into wheelchairs that kick up less stink than some arseholes on a plane.
The whole point is its temporary. The only excuse to whinge, whine and make noise that is therefore acceptable is if you are a minor whose parents think you should spend 3 hours in the air going to a QLD beach, as opposed to the perfectly fine, and infact world heritage beaches of VIC.
Parents should wise up (one of my parents most redeaming features was to realise neither I or my siblings enjoyed beach holidays, playing soccer etc and thus such 'enjoyment' should not be forced upon us) and just leave the kids at home.
Criminal negligence is better than being inconsiderate to strangers.

5. Suck it up, Man up, Don't cry over spilt milk, etc.

Australian's have to be the worst customers in the world. Australian backpackers have certainly been rated as the worst. This may shock or surprise some, but I think it actually stems from the fact that we are 'Not Americans' and thus people can naively overlook their own behaviour whilst saying 'those fucking crass Americans'.
Sure, go to Venice or Paris and the Americans fit the stereotype, they are big fat retirees from Florida that barely have their head around the concept of passport, certainly not exchange rates and are fat and smell bad.
But unlike Australian's if you meet a young American in Europe, South East Asia etc, they are aware that they are not at home and generally represent the best of their nation.
Australian's on flights, before flights and afterflights, treat every customer service situation as if the only service providers in the world are Myers and McDonalds. Demanding refunds, demanding extras, demanding preferential treatment, demanding, demanding, demanding.
I feel personally I am suited to a 'caveat emptor' society, unlike the 'caveat vendor' society we live in. Don't speak latin? The former is 'buyer beware' the latter is 'vendor/seller beware'.
That means, instead of us consumers being on the lookout for rip-offs, hustlers, crooks, we are a society of rip-offs, hustlers and crooks that spill our drinks on purpose, put our own hair in our meals, demand to speak to managers, slip on staircases, shoplift, cut lines, scalp etc.
To me, if you are on a flight, it stands to reason you are a captive audience. It also stands to reason that simply not everyone can sit in the bulkhead aisle. Yet literally on my homeflight from LAX to Melbourne, I was sat next to a 'fellow Aussie' that complained to me that she had asked for her husband, and the stupid lady had seperated her and her husband.
To me, evidently, she had been one of the last to check in, and the 'stupid lady' at the check in counter should be entitled to laugh in her face, and I mean in her face maybe even lighting up a cigar and exhaling directly into her nostrils in the process, just for asking for the bulkhead.
But like the stupid lady, I did not allude to just how unreasonable her request probably was, and a steward eventually reseated her, to which I then had a delightful conversation with an elderly American woman who seemed positively sophisticated compared to that particular Australian, and more or less most of the Australians I have ever met here there or anywhere. and she liked President Truman.

So basically, if you follow this 'ettiquette' what you get are the two flights to and from Sydney I experienced over the weekend.

1. nobody went to the bathroom from a window seat.
2. nobody jammed their head in a window and obstructed anyone elses view.
3. Many people used the underseat stowing option.
4. I heard one child cry and they shut-up when their mother told them to.
5. I didn't hear anyone complain or make an unreasonable demand.

I just now live in fear that I experienced some improbable, statisticle annomaly, like winning the lottery first division twice, and the rest of my life will be back to annoying as usual.