While I agree this should be true (unless they chose to have a brain and leave said infant home) where did the OP say this? All he said was he is frustrated that something that is almost guaranteed to irritate many people is allowed on the airplane free.
Yeah right. It is just as likely that an adult is going to need to sleep off a hangover or is going to have SBD farts as it is that an infant is going to have a screaming fit at some point in any flight more than an hour long? Most don’t even wait that long.
We are sorry that you are too fucking cheap to pay for a seat for it. Guess you don’t really want to see it as bad as you claim.
Which is exactly why infants shouldn’t be on planes. They have many legit reasons to need to scream, and it can be difficult to get them to stop. Add in an increasing number of people who seem to think that it is OK for babies to scream in public, and you get mothers who do little or nothing. I keep hoping that I’ll live long enough to see us go back to personal responsibility & consideration for others, but it just keeps getting worse every year.
As for your #4, I highly doubt the OP is complaining about the sort of crying that only lasts until mom can get a bottle into it. No, I imagine it is more like the babies I’ve had the misfortune to fly with, whose mothers couldn’t be bothered to bring anything but the absolute basics, who couldn’t plan ahead and who freaking didn’t know that you need to have something for baby to drink during take off and landing for baby’s ears.
So, only people who haven’t had kids get irritated at babies screaming in enclosed spaces? And what in the world does him having once been an infant have to do with it? That has got to be the dumbest retort to this issue yet.
As for parental skills, just let me point out that every time I’ve had the rotten luck to be seated near a baby screaming during takeoff/landing, the mother didn’t know that giving it something to drink was very likely to help. “Parental skills” tend to suck these days.
This is a dumb retort too. Even if it was true that the OP’s parents were dumb enough to take him on such a flight, whether or not he screamed all the way is their fault, not his.
What’s the difference if the infant flies free or if it has a paid seat? Does it make a different amount of noise? And good grief, babies under the age of two aren’t spoiled, they’re babies. And they’re a fact of life. Deal with it.
I’d rather be on a plane full of screaming infants than be stuck on another flight listening to loud, drunk, business travelers harassing the flight crew and telling filthy jokes…
For what it’s worth, I’ve never traveled with a baby who was on a free ticket and cried on a plane. The reason being, if they’re young enough to fly free, they’re also young enough to shut it when I stick a bottle or a boob in their mouth. It’s the 3-year-old who makes everyone’s trip unbearable, especially including his parents, and I may have paid more for his ticket than you did for yours.
Seconded. I’m never bothered by babies crying, but most of the child sounds are coming from older than 1 year. The babies are just crying a bit at takeoff and landing, and that’s it.
Also, the ones who have annoyed me the most are drunk, loud, adults. Give me the babies instead of the adults.
I’m totally with BPC and the Curlinator. Except I don’t think they go far enough. I’d say ban infants. Period. Not just on planes. That’d save us all the other serious problems associated with children, like, them walking on our precious lawns, laughing and playing loudly when we’re hung over and, you know, being not perfectly polite at all times. And as a bonus, the Earth would be a lot better off in some 75 years’ time.
I have in fact run into the mythical constantly crying infant on a plane. I flew the red eye from Toronto to London once and a woman with a young baby (maybe about six months?) was on the plane. She seemed prepared with toys and bottles and everything, and got the kid through take off fine, but the baby started wailing shortly after that and just could not be consoled. This poor woman tried everything, and ended up walking up and down the aisles of the plane for most of the flight. Seriously, that kid cried on and off (mostly on) for seven straight hours. I’m not a baby-hater (although I admit I don’t care for them particularly), but I felt like I was going crazy by the end. I’m sure other people felt the same.
Still, I couldn’t hold it against that baby because it was just doing its baby thing. And the mother was doing her best, but that kid just wasn’t having it. And I have to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume that she had a good reason to undertake such a long flight with an infant, because I don’t think someone would do that for fun. Also, after the flight ended and I got a few hours of sleep I wasn’t really angry anymore, because, well, what’s the point?
All this is to say that while I believe you that your kids were easily quieted as babies, the endlessly screaming baby does exist. But I’ve flown transatlantic multiple times and that’s the only time I’ve encountered that. Hell, I flew all the way to Australia and back and the babies on those flights hardly made a peep. So I do think that the people who claim that they constantly have this problem are either exaggerating or are the kind of crotchety people who are just looking for something to bitch about.
No, but it is a lot less irritating if you know that the parents had to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of making us listen to that noise. And maybe if they had to pay for it, the wouldn’t bring them so often?
Why? Why should those of us who aren’t deaf to screaming kids have to just “deal with it”? Particularly when you all can’t be arsed to “deal with” the choices non-parents make. Why should I be required to pay $100 to bring a puppy home under the seat that no one even knows is there, but the squalling baby in the back of that flight got on free? If a drunk won’t sit down and shut up, he’ll be escorted off the plane but the one time that happened to a toddler and it was national news. And I think the airline had to pay to get the parents to shut up on that one? Don’t remember. Anyway, the only one of the things that make air travel miserable that is getting a free pass is babies.
Um, the way the flight turned out wasn’t fun, but I’d bet that the reason the mother and baby were there in the first place wasn’t for business or because they were being forced to relocate. Most likely she was off to visit relatives who just had to see the new baby.
I haven’t flown transatlantic but I have flown coast to coast and run into a lot of noisy children, probably due to where I’m flying out of. I don’t know how many of them were flying for free since I don’t know what the cut off is - do they pay full fare after that cut off? Anyway, I don’t go back and identify the age of the noisemaker, I have just been assuming that if it isn’t using words it is a baby that is flying for free. Maybe not true if the cut off is really young.
The cutoff is age 2. Kids older than that used to be able to fly half-price with an adult paying full-fare, but now it is generally full-fare for everyone. Babies only get to fly free if you agree to hold them the whole flight - if you want them in their own seat, you buy it at full price.
Meyer6, I don’t doubt that there are a few babies who simply cannot be comforted, although I can’t think it’s very many. I doubt I could have made it seven hours in that mother’s place - at the very least, I would have to hand the baby off and spend the next day whimpering quietly in my room after an experience like that. But you probably would have been treated to the sight of me weeping quietly over the screaming baby for much of the flight. It sounds unbearable.
And? Are you suggesting that visiting distant family is not an acceptable reason to fly? In any case, I doubt anyone would think that a flight with an infant would be fun in and of itself, they just think it’s worth it in order to get where they’re going.
I see plenty of babies on planes, they just aren’t generally terribly obnoxious. I doubt the places you fly have special children who are noisier than standard issue children, I’m guessing you’re just more sensitive than most people are.
Oh, I’m sure it’s rare. Actually I know it’s rare, because out of dozens (hundreds?) of flights I’ve been on, that one stands out in my mind as ‘the one with the incredible crying baby’. I felt terrible for that woman - she looked miserable, and clearly felt bad. But what can you do?
You are so full of it, you are just making stuff up now. You don’t possibly care whether the poor airlines are making extra money off of babies or not. It’s not like you’re personally being reimbursed for the agony you have to go through to be in the same plane cabin as those potentially crying babies. What they pay or don’t pay is none of your concern and has no bearing on you, only on the bottom line of the airlines.
Flying with a baby in lap is damned hard. If you’d ever tried it, you’d wonder why the airlines didn’t pay you for the extra difficulty. I did it once and would never do it again.
Babies are a fact of human life just like slow-moving people and loud-talking people and snoring people and bad-smelling people. Would you ban the mentally handicapped from flying too, lest they make too much noise for you? In this world, we make accommodations for people whose capabilities are different from our own. They have as much right to fly as you do, even if they do impinge on your delicate ears.
If you have so much trouble with this every time you fly, one would think you’d have learned how to operate ear plugs by now.
I agree. She’s also conveniently ignoring the fact that lots of the things ‘non-parents’ do are potentially annoying and the rest of us do actually have to put up with them. I’ve sat through a (mercifully short) flight where someone’s dog whimpered and yelped loudly the whole time. I was also on a flight once when someone’s pet cat pulled a Houdini, got out of his carrier, and ran around the cabin for a while making mayhem until he could be recaptured. That’s not to mention the allergy problems pets can cause. I like animals, and I felt bad for the poor dog who was just scared, but it is ridiculous to claim that pets are 100% fine and babies are 100% awful.
I’ve also experienced many, many annoyingly drunk passengers who were apparently not troublesome enough to get booted off, so that’s a bit of a red herring too.
It appears it is not so much the free aspect you object to as the fly thing with regard to babies. That’s fine, we all have our preferences. I’d prefer if airline policy barred fat people, and ugly people, niggers and spicks, the queers, and the coons, the reds and the Jews.
But, if we were good at dealing with facts or life… we wouldn’t be here.
digs (who drove cross country to a conference, just to avoid the stale air and annoying noises of an airplane)
Malaysian Airlines is great. They (at least when I was in the business) have a HR IT system which is specially extended with functionality to asses the attractiveness of the female stewardesses. I bet first class only get assigned the 10s. Woe be on me, for not having the funds to travel on Malaysian Airlines first class. Clearly neither Lufthansa nor Aeroflot have any such rating system.
