Last night’s late-night flight included several young children in my section of the airplane (the dungeon of the 757, otherwise known as Row 47, the second-to-last row), and three of them screamed for most of the four-hour flight.
The only way I can “sleep” on a red-eye flight is to have a good strong mixed beverage beforehand (double Cuervo Gold margarita, hold the salt) and chase it with a couple of Benadryl or a Tylenol PM. That’s usually enough to put anyone, including me, into a coma. But even though I felt I was sufficiently self-medicated during last night’s trip, I could only doze off briefly between the shrieks of the panicked toddlers.
I’m not a curmudgeon, but I’m all for sectioning off an area for the under-five set. I’m fairly certain most parents would go for this idea as well. Make it interesting and fun, sort of a cross between McDonald’s play land and Disneyworld. Put it in the aft or dungeon section, where people with connecting flights don’t want to be but where, as things stand, they usually end up simply by the luck of the draw.
While they’re at it, a truly progressive airline would figure out a way to configure red-eye aircraft so that everyone is reclining in the prone position. Heck, I would pay a king's ransom if I could just lie down flat. I don’t need a mattress or even a blanket, but a nice flat surface would be a godsend. I spent most of the early morning just before landing trying to do the math in my head. Can they get more people on a plane that way? Perhaps the airlines can provide pods encased in sound-proofing, so that old folks like me who want to sleep can't hear the screams of frightened babies. Such pods could double as flotation devices in the unlikely event of crashing into water.
Hmm... Sleep deprivation really does affect critical thinking.
All in all, though, if I had a choice, late-night flying in a packed aircraft full of howling babies is the considerably better option than that long car trip in a Ford Focus with a surly teenager.
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