Five Simple Ways To Improve Air Travel So It’s Not Completely Unbearable

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There I sat. Pinned between two overweight people in the middle seat because of Southwest’s loose seating system. I struggled to keep the smalls of my elbows on the armrests while my knees banged against the seat in front of me during some aggressive turbulence. When I missed the flight attendant’s offer to give me peanuts while my sound-cancelling headphones played some shitty podcast, I had the realization – flying fucking sucks.

All I could do from that point forward was stew over the shittiness of commercial airlines while holding my pee in because I was too afraid to ask the person next to me to move so I could use the bathroom. And honestly, I came up with some pretty good fucking ideas to make air travel a little more tolerable.

Ban water service.

If I wanted to drink poor people Dasani, I would have just brought some for myself. I didn’t overpay for this flight to be given a cup of water like I’m running a marathon. You think Don Draper and Roger Sterling would have put up with that? No, they wouldn’t have. They would’ve asked for three fingers of brown and gotten off the plane with a little kick in their step.

While sure, I appreciate the gesture, I’m not all that psyched to drink the six fluid ounces of water or ginger ale or tomato juice or whatever they’re serving these days. Between the circular ice cubes cutting the inside of my mouth and my constant fear that my drink will fly onto my laptop during any bout of turbulence, drink service at least needs to be made worth it by serving up some complimentary cocktails.

Improved wi-fi.

Hey, we’ve all got flights to catch and because you’re making me pay $14.95 for your janky Boingo hotspot bullshit, I’m unable to check my flight status during the second leg of my trip. I’d be fine coughing up $14.95 if I had any faith that my signal wouldn’t get dropped at any given moment, but that’s just not happening.

If you’re going to tell me to put my phone in airplane mode, at least give me the means to scroll my feeds and check my noties without having to go into Settings a million times over. Until further notice, I’m going to be the guy who leaves his data network on even after we take off, and then I’m turning it back on once you tell me to stow all my shit again. If the plane goes down because I was trying to load some shitty Snapchats, so be it. At least I’ll die happy.

Stop making me sit in the upright position.

Who the fuck actually wants to be in the upright position? Anyone? Half the time, I don’t even realize my seat is reclined when I sit down because the difference is so negligible. But when the dude in front of me reclines into me, I LOSE it. Then it’s a domino effect and everyone on the flight is livid even though we’re all losing just a couple of inches of space.

Just keep all seats reclined at all times. It’s not like the three degrees of my recline are going to paralyze me during our shotty landing.

Female flight attendants must wear neckerchiefs.

There’s something sexy and refined about a piece of silk loosely tied around a flight attendants neck. Maybe it’s because they come off as being luxuriously European or maybe I had a nanny that did it as a child, but something about a neckerchief vibes with me in a primal way. Even the bitchiest of flight attendants could probably get my motor running with the right neck accessory.

Phone chargers.

It’s two-thousand-fucking-sixteen. Let me live. If you’re not going to show an in-flight movie, you gotta at least let me get a little juice because this phone is all I got. I know I can take my laptop out and plug my phone in through there, but then I’m just going to sit there paranoid that the person in the middle seat is looking at my inappropriate group texts. If we can put a man on the moon or figure out how fax machines work, we can figure out how to give your boy a charge when he’s paying top-dollar to fly cross-country.

But y’all are the ones who still can’t seem to figure out how to take off on time, so I won’t hold my breath. .

Image via Unsplash

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Will

Will (Twitter / Instagram) is the host of The Sunday Scaries Podcast.

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