Two aviation news items recently caught my eye; a ban on electronic gadgets on flights, and a long-haul flight that flew passengers without any working toilets.
I could not decide which was the worse of the two.
Maybe if you did not eat mushy food or drink anything then you can manage the trip over the Atlantic and Alaska without going to the washroom even once, I wondered.
But nobody can hold on for that long — for 16 hours — as the flight was from Delhi to Chicago and especially since airlines are notorious for handing out free beverages.
Passenger to stewardess: “Can I have two more cans of that? I like to arrange them on my food tray.”
There were reportedly 324 passengers and 16 crew on board and as everyone started squirming, it was considered stopping over at Toronto for a toilet break, but to the utter dismay of everyone the plane flew or floated on to Chicago.
The pain would have been excruciating, I thought, wincing in sympathy for the passengers, including pesky kids who just have to go as you are settling down to watching ShahRukh Khan wooing Anushka Sharma and singing your favourite song.
Holding on is never recommended as the bladder then sloshes things around for a while and starts to protest and sends signals like the dull ache you get when you have kidney stones, where you have kneel and hold your side and moan quietly.
I keep reading reports about passengers suddenly trying to open the airplane door in mid-flight and I think airlines do not tell the real backstory to such events.
Most probably it occurred because of flooded toilets and the passenger was so desperate he was ready to spray through the open door into the minus 43 degree Celsius temperature at 30,000 feet up in the air.
Two things one should never do as it is very discourteous to your fellow passengers: One, never relieve yourself from the door of a running train just because the train toilet is dirty, as you may spray people watching the scenery and taking in fresh air three carriages down the line. Second, never throw things into the plane loo. There is a sign above the toilet bowl with a red multiplication sign crossing out stuff like baby diapers and gold biscuits.
Most of the flooded toilets must be due to smugglers who get cold feet and dump the biscuits, wrapped in baby diapers, into the loo. There is a lot of money to be made in gold smuggling to India if you have the nerve.
But the flight with the clogged toilets was flying to Chicago not the other way around to Mumbai, Delhi or Kochi, so I guess everyone must have dumped their laptops and iPads into the toilet.
The laptop ban seems like another one of those silly Trump executive orders. No one I know uses a laptop during a flight, especially in the cattle or economy class, what with the lady at the back pushing your seat all the time and the elderly passenger in the window seat wanting to go to the toilet one more time, there is not a free moment or enough space to watch the movie you downloaded secretly at home before the flight.
In the Business Class, there is no time to work on your laptop with the stewardess constantly bringing you gourmet stuff to eat and after quaffing all those bubblies you need to nap and dream about the bonus you will get even after you bankrupted the company.
Meanwhile read Royal Jordanian’s advice on 12 things to do without your electronic gadgets: 1) Read a book 2) Pretend food tray is a keyboard 3) Reclaim territory on armrest...
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/ mahmood_saberi.
